DD Direct E Auction revenue

The Doordarshan’s Direct to home Service DD Direct sold its slots on its DTH through e auction last month. We had reported about it on our blog . Like the 3 g auction for mobile telephony  and BWA auction brought revenue in the same way the recently held e auctions of DD Direct . The revenue surpassed the imaginations of the people in India. Doordarshan has till now added successfully auctioned and sold 26 slots. It has allotted the 26 slots to the private broadcasters on DD Direct. This has resulted in Rs 63 crore revenue.

This revenue of Rs 63 crores is more than three times the amount of what it used to generate before migrating to the e-auction mechanism two months ago (charging R80 lakh/slot). Also, now the average revenue per slot has jumped to R2.42 crore. DD is gearing up to put 90 more slots for auctions within the next few months as it increases its capacity from 59 to 150 channels. Based on the current average slot rate, Doordarshan will get another R217 crore thereby crossing the R280-crore mark before March 31, 2012.

It is being said that the slot-auction revenue alone will account for nearly one-third of the planned budget allocations for Doordarshan. Between July 28 to August 30, Prasar Bharati conducted two e-auctions which saw participation from over 45 private media companies. In the first leg of auctions, the minimum reserve price per slot was R1.5 crore which was raised to R2.17 crore, the lowest successful bid in the first e-auction. Even after the substantial hike in the minimum reserve price in the second-leg of e-auctions, as many as eight broadcasters showed up, of which five become the successful.

The highest slot price in the second set of auctions stood at R3.50 crore, 55% up from the previous highest of R2.25 crore that the first auction had fetched in July-end. In both the e-auctions, the lowest successful bids were 42-44% more than the minimum reserve price while the highest bids on both occasion were 50-55% above the minimum reserve price. Doordarshan is the first public broadcaster to adopt e-auctions for allocating slots to private broadcasters on its free-to-air DTH platform. This happened after a legal tussle between some private channels and Prasar Bharati last year when it had removed a few channels without assigning a valid and acceptable reasons.