MUMBAI: Prasar Bharati has sold four DD Free Dish MPEG 4 slots on pro-rata basis for the period from 1 February 2020 to 14 March 2020 to four channels for Rs 66 lakh. The channels are Samay (Hindi News), 9X Jalwa (Hindi Music), Sangeet Bangla (Bangla Music) and JK 24x7 News (Hindi News). 

Bidding in the e-auction of MPEG-4 slots was open to all genres (language) channels at a reserve price of Rs 16,50,000. 

On 10 January, Prasar Bharati had invited application from the channels licensed by the ministry of information and broadcasting. International public broadcasters licensed/registered by the Ministry of I&B were also allowed to participate in the e-auction.

The public broadcaster has instructed that the allotted channels to pay the amount in two installments along with the carriage fee and applicable GST. The channel will have to pay the first installment in advance by 30 January 2020 i.e before placement of channel on DD Free Dish DTH Platform and second installment to be payable by 27 February 2020 after adjusting the participation fee amount.  

In November 2019, it had sold MPEG-2 slots of DD Free Dish on pro-rata basis for the period from 1 December 2019 to 29 February 2020 to eight channels for approx Rs 18.9 crore. The channels were ABZY Cool in Movies genre (Hindi) under bucket A; Showbox in Music genre (Hindi) under bucket B; Ganga Biskope in Movies genre (Bhojpuri) under bucket B; WOW in Music genre (Hindi) under bucket B; TV9 Bharatvarsh News genre (Hindi) under C; ABP Ganga in genre (Hindi) under bucket C; Zee Punjabi in others (PUnjabi) under bucket D and MR TV in others (Marathi) under Bucket D. For MPEG 2 slot the pubcaster had reserved the starting price of bucket A for Rs 3.11 crore; bucket B for Rs 2.73 crore; bucket C for Rs 2.23 crore and bucket D for Rs 1.55 crore.