Despite constraints priority now to monetize, says, Prasar Bharti's CEO

India, August 2020: National broadcaster Prasar Bharti has said that to be self-sufficient, its priority now is to monetize despite the fact that unlike private channels it has to work under several constraints.

In a live conversation with Kailashnath Adhikari, MD, Governance Now during the Visionary Talk series held by the public policy platform, Shashi Shekhar Vempati, CEO, Prasar Bharati spoke on how DD is planning to scale up its presence and monetize its rich legacy of content.    

Illustrating with an example of the recently released  film Shakuntala Devi on Amazon Prime, Vempati said that after the teams at PB uncovered two old videos of the mathematician  from  the 1970’s in black and white and another from the 1980s in colour, the black and white video went viral and crossed 2 million views generating them huge revenues.

“Monetization challenges us to be tech and content savvy in a competitive environment. Currently, DD is monetizing their archival content through digital mediums.”

Speaking on how the Free Dish changed things for better and worst in the free to air market, Vemapati said that it has scaled up their reach in the markets and created a new revenue stream. On the flip side also strengthened competition.

 

“Free Dish is important for us as it generates substantial revenue at low costs, builds surplus and takes care of deficit. After the struggle of the last three years, the lockdown has brought us centre stage. Despite all the private channels, new content, unlock and even acquiring of DD content, our 9 PM slot of Sri Krishna continues to be top Tier”

He said that Prasar Bharti is now monetizing its mobile app Newson Air which has 200 plus radio screens and very popular globally, and plans are afoot to expand the presence of the national broadcaster globally which unlike BBC and Al Jazeera so far it does not have.

Vemapti, however, added that being public broadcaster, Prasar Bharti has certain obligations which are not necessarily commercial and therefore cannot monetize anything and everything.

 “As a responsibility and we share our content without expectation. So, monetization only happens to that degree and not beyond it. To the extent we can, we do monetize, we do share a lot of our content without the expectation of monetization” he said while referring to recent Bhoomi Pujan of Ram Mandir at Ayodhya by the prime minister, Narendra Modi,  when despite sharing their live telecast with 200 private channels, barring a few  most channels had  masked the DD logo with L-Bands and advertisements.         

To the question that why DD could not capitalize despite its massive reach in the last decade the Prasar Bharti CEO responded by saying that it happened due to  unresolved legacy of internal issues as post the creation of Prasar Bharti in 1997 after which DD and AIR which were earlier govt departments were brought under it, yet the employees continued to remain govt employees.

‘This was an anomalous situation where the public broadcaster is an autonomous corporate yet all its employees were govt employees. This broad weighted many legacy issues which till date continue to be litigated in courts. The unfortunate consequence of this was that the creative community in DD and AIR did not get promotions and were not motivated to work beyond their call of work.”