(22 March 2007 7:30 pm)

NEW DELHI: Prasar Bharati CEO BS Lalli today formally announced that Doordarshan has been beaming four channels for mobile phones and these can be viewed with the appropriate equipment within a radius of 10 km, thus confirming an earlier report by indiantelevision.com.

Lali made a plethora of announcement, among which are the changes being brought in the DD Direct, DD's DTH service, revenue generation efforts, facing the challenge of content improvement even while sticking to the mandate of the public broadcaster, and also hi definition TV project.

On mobile TV, Lali said that the streaming is on, but clarified that there is no single manufacturing company that DD would work with, "unlike as suggested in sections of the media".

He announced also that the necessary frequencies for the mobile TV programme have been allocated already.

DD is now streaming four of its channels (DD 1, DD News, DD Sports and DD Bharati), he said, adding that in the near future, this would climb to eight or even 10, and hoped that the commercial launch would be in May this year.

He said that already a small amount of Rs 10 crore has been spent on the project and a few more minor changes needed to be introduced to calibrate it to the mobile format, requiring another for to five crore.

He explained that the screen being small, the calibration would optimise viewing, the anchors for the programmes would be shot at a closer range so the face is more prominent and even the scrolls would be made larger for easy reading.

He said DD was also looking for new, "snappy, tech-savvy" content for the present generation, and mentioned that already in places like Italy, new content (like 25-minute films) for mobile TV is being developed and DD was looking into this.

Without clarifying much, he said DD would develop a "nice business model for the project, and said that the range (now 10 km radius) would first be increased to cover all Delhi, and then take the programme to the three remaining metros.

DD has discussed the issue of the equipment with LG, Samsung and other parties, especially the pricing, which is very high at the moment.

"The price of the equipment is now about Rs 32,000, and we have told them that India is a very price sensitive country and asked them to reduce some features keep the relevant and necessary ones and bring down the price, which they say could be around Rs 15,000," Lali said.

He assured, also, that once the volume of sales goes up, the prices would come tumbling and could touch something like Rs 6,000 in the near future.