Doordarshan Suspends 37th FreeDish Online e-Auction

The 37th online auction for vacant general entertainment channels on Doordarshan’s free-to-air DTH platform FreeDish slated for August 22, 2017 has been put off. The auction has been kept in abeyance due to administrative reasons till further order.

Earlier it had been announced that auction would be held with differential reserve prices for general entertainment channels and news channels. The reserve price for general entertainment channels was fixed at Rs. 8.0 crore but the reserve price for news and current affairs channels was Rs. 26.5 crore.

While the current capacity of 80 TV channels is all full, this will rise to 104 with the completion of MPEG4 trials which is expected over the next two months. FreeDish had got approval to increase this capacity to 250 channels that will materialize in the third quarter of 2018.

In line with Digital India and Make in India DD has implemented Indian CAS (iCAS) on DD FreeDish Platform. The existing viewers will continue to get 80 SDTV channels and 32 radio channels, but will have to obtain iCAS-enabled authorized STBs for accessing all new channels.