FICCI Frames'15: Challenges of being a pub caster

FICCI Frames has seen some eminent personalities from the broadcasting industry. All CEO’s be it private broadcasters or public broadcasters have addressed the audience on various topics from content to growth in the industry.

In a session of the importance of the public broadcaster in the media, Adgully caught up with Jawahar Sircar to know more about the challenges that are there in the way forward.

On asking Sircar about key strategies in the way forward he said, “We have two key strategies. One being to concentrate on Freedish. It’s a platform that currently offers 50 Free-to-air channels and is planning to increase it to 112. The subscription cost for the same is about Rs.2000 for a lifetime.” He adds, “The existing users will have to pay additional charge for the extra channels that we introduce. In short they will have to upgrade themselves in case they want to. We have all possible channels in the free-to-air platform from Star, to Sony to Zee and all other major channels are present and we are trying to get Discovery and other channels as well.”

“The second strategy being to cover about 62% of the population with our offering of 1400 transmitters for Akash wani and 300 transmitters for DD which no other broadcaster has.”

On asking about how many channels they currently have he said, “In our Worli (Mumbai) office we have about 20 channels of which only two are operational. We plan to auction 15 of them.”

Sharing insights on the recent hiring that happened at the channel he said, “This is possibly the first time in 20 years that we hired consultants and not creative people. It was a decision that was taken by higher Government authorities and we have practically not hired in 20 years.”

There is a dearth of manpower in our organization and the Government really needs to address that as young talent needs to come in to take the organization to greater heights.

In the end it must be noted that as a public broadcaster, there are a lot of limitations and challenges when it comes to certain things and it will change in time to come. By Archit Ambekar | Twitter: @aambarchit

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