Doordarshan's Problems

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Themes: Brand Management
Period : 1994-2001
Organization : Doordarshan
Pub Date : 2002
Countries : India
Industry : Media, Entertainment & Information

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Case Code : BSTR012
Case Length : 8 Pages
Price: Rs. 200;

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Three options came up before the committee - first, privatization of DD, second; DD continuing as a Public service broadcaster (PSB), and third, running DD on both PSB and commercially viable lines. Of the three options, the committee recommended the third option. The committee felt that there was no need to privatize DD but recommended drastic steps for its revival.

One of the important steps suggested by the committee were:

• to downsize 25% of DD's 21,000 strong staff,
• getting into new media,
• setting up its own marketing department,
• and developing a sharper programming focus.

One of the recommendations was to improve the quality of broadcast DD sought the help of BBC to digitise its channels. Modi Entertainment Network¹⁴ begun distributing the five DD channels (National, Metro, News, Sports and World) via satellite.

DD went in for a revenue sharing deal with B4U¹⁵ for showing movies, and auctioned 7-10 p.m. slot on DD Metro to HFCL-Nine network¹⁶, which supplied the DD with programs for the 3 hours. In addition to Rs 1.21 bn that DD got from this deal, the move helped DD to penetrate into urban homes and also C&S homes to some extent.

DD also entered into an agreement with the Direct to Home (DTH) platforms like Echostar and Astra to distribute DD-World in 79 countries. DD employed Accenture¹⁷ to advice it on how to go about revamping its financial, management and administrative systems.

The National Institute of Design was employed to redesign the logo. In 2000, DD announced that it would start its own peoplemeter¹⁸ project through a separate corporate entity in partnership with a few private channels and some advertisers.

DD felt that its programmes were not getting enough viewership ratings because the viewer sample being used by the two firms doing the ratings - IMRB-Ac Neilsen and ORG-Marg were skewed towards C&S homes and hence did not accurately reflect the viewing habits of the Indian populace.

Analysts felt that while all the above steps looked attractive from the revenue point of view, the real problem was freeing DD from political interference.

14] Modi Entertainment Network (MEN) owned by the Modi Group, markets and distributes Indian and International satellite pay channels to provide accessibility to the Indian consumers. The channels distributed by MEN include Hallmark, B4U Music, DD Metro, DD sports, MCM, Kermit etc.
15] A vertically integrated company, B4U Network is involved in all aspects of the Bollywood film industry from film making to film distribution and merchandising. Based in London, it was promoted by L M Mittal, Kishore Lulla and Gokul Binani.
16] It was joint venture between the Australia's media tycoon Kerry Packer's Nine Network channel and Narendra Mehta's HFCL.
17] Formerly Andersen consulting
18] A PeopleMeter is a combination of hardware devices used in panel homes to collect television viewing information. With help of this information the Television viewership ratings are announced by the companies.