Prasar Bharati asks BARC India to act against 9 Zee Media news channels

Public broadcaster Prasar Bharati has asked TV viewership measurement body BARC India to take necessary action against nine news and current affairs channels of Zee Media, which are available on DD Free Dish, without paying slot fee to the pubcaster.
Acting on a complaint filed by rival TV18 Broadcast, Prasar Bharati has written to Nakul Chopra, CEO, BARC India, in respect of data on free-to-air (FTA) platforms.

“It is to convey that 9 TV channels have not been allotted slots of DD Free Dish by Prasar Bharati and are not part of the DD Free Dish bouquet pf channels… necessary action with regards to the channels may please be taken,” read the letter, signed by Inderjeet Grewal, director (Platforms) at Prasar Bharati.

These channels include Zee Madhya Pradesh/ Chhattisgarh, Zee Bihar/ Jharkhand, Zee Uttar Pradesh/ Uttarakhand, Zee Salam, Zee Rajasthan, Zee 24 Kalak (Gujarati), Zee Punjab/ Haryana/ Himachal Pradesh, Zee 24 Taas (Marathi), and Zee Odhisa.

In a separate communication, Grewal has written to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), stating that the public broadcaster has already brought the issue of availability of unencrypted private TV channels on FTA set top boxes (STBs) to the ministry’s notice through various correspondences on a regular basis for appropriate action.

“MIB is again requested to take appropriate action in the matter, so that such private channels, which are not part of DD Free Dish bouquet, are not available on FTA STBs,” the letter to the MIB read.

In the past, several news networks have written to the government against direct-to-home operator Dish TV and Zee Media for uplinking unencrypted signals of various regional news channels.

The rival networks claim that Zee Media’s channels were getting this "unfair advantage" at a time when the government had given the go-ahead to release TV viewership ratings of the news genre after a 15-month hiatus.

Zee Media has paid for only two slots on DD Free Dish and telecasting of more channels results in a loss of revenue for the government, they alleged.

However, replying on a petition in a related matter in the Delhi high court, the MIB had submitted via an affidavit that while encryption of channels is mandatory as per the clause 7.5 of the DTH guidelines, the same is not a requirement if the signals are uplinked via teleport.

“Uplinking of signals on the teleport in unencrypted format is not a violation of the aforementioned clause of DTH Guidelines. It is purely coincidental that both DD Free Dish and certain channels of Dish TV are uplinked unencrypted and available on DD Free Dish platform because of proximity and co-location of transponders of both parties on the same satellite i.e. GSAT 15 satellite," the affidavit reads.

As per industry estimates, DD Free Dish has more than 40 million subscribers, which is over a quarter of the total TV households in the country.

Availability on DD Free Dish gives a major boost to any channel’s reach. Placement of channels on the DTH service is a major source of revenue for the public broadcaster, which had last auctioned off the slots for around Rs 8.95 crore per channel a year for Hindi and about Rs 6.20 crore per channel for regional languages.

Zee Media, which runs a clutch of national and regional news channels, has paid for only two slots and telecasts Zee news and Zee Hindustan officially on the Free Dish platform, according to rival networks.