Doordarshan forays into broadband content

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 customize it to entice customers to
make it 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 be complete within three months and Doordarshan
hopes to launch it by January 26, 2001. Initially, the news.com site would be
launched and gradually the DD Metro and DD Regional channels would be
incorporated. 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 face time constraints like the
television. Says Prasar Bharti CEO Rajiv Rattan Shah, "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 programs at his will and
leisure."

The revenue streams of the project are advertising, content syndication,
merchandising 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. The portal which would initially
be available on narrow-band, would later be available on broadband as well.