Doordarshan forays into braodband content

Cyber News Service


New Delhi

The much-talked about Doordarshan's foray into the world of broadband content is finally happening. It will launch an entertainment portal that would host all the contents of Doordarshan. It has tied up with Satyam Infoway to provide end-to-end consultancy and to execute its entertainment portal,

www.ddindia.com. The objective is to make the content highly personalized and cutomized it to entice the customer to make ddindia their homepage. By providing value to the viewer, the portal hopes to create a community of viewers, which would be leveraged at a later date to enable e-commerce.


The project is expected to complete within three months and Doordarshan hopes to launch it by Republic Day which is 26 January 2001. Initially the news.com site would be launched and gradually DD Metro and DD Regional channels would be launched onto the portal. Some of the features of the portal include news from Doordarshan, audio-video live, audio-video-on-demand, as well as archival facilities. The viewer would have access to much more information than what is offered on Doordarshan since the portal would not have the time constraints as the television. Says Rajiv Rattan Shah, CEO, Prasar Bharti, "With the onset of the digital age we also expect the viewing habits of people to change. The big advantage of the Internet is its interactive quality which will bring about radical changes. The viewer can now watch programmes at his will and at leisure." 

The revenue streams of the project are advertising, content syndication, merchanding opportunity, cross-references, data mining and pay-per-view of its archival and video-audio on demand facilities.

The portal would be based on the Broadvision platform and targeted at the domestic as well as the international viewer. This would include both NRIs and the Indophiles, said Shah. The portal when launched would be available on narrowband but gradually the channel is expected to be available on braodband as well. 

On the anvil are some of the programmes of Doordarshan like a six-hour live news channel between 6 am to 4 pm which would also be made available to the portal. The portal would also offer a radio music channel.