In a bid to compete with channels, DD news seeks a private helping hand

DD news is a bilingual channel under public service broadcaster Doordarshan with English and Hindi news bulletins alternating on it.

DD and All India Radio's parent body Prasar Bharati has been mulling changing this equation and making DD News a purely Hindi language channel and making DD's international channel DD India an English news channel.

In a bid to compete with the multitude of private television news channels dominating India's news space, Doordarshan (DD) News has decided to seek professional help for another round of image makeover.

An expression of interest has already been invited to hire a private agency, which will work on "providing creative inputs, technical infrastructure and man power for enhancing look and feel of DD (News) channel".

This agency will be tasked with designing graphics and animation for everyday news bulletins and programmes on current affairs. They also will be working on developing an application that would help updating of news tickers on news breaks, and other news updates.

The agency is also responsible for composing original music for them, creating story-specific, animated real-time graphics for daily operations of the channel, developing weather graphics with automatic generation, as well as providing professional manpower and requisite software and hardware for daily assignments at DD News.

Former journalist and Prasar Bharati chairman A Surya Prakash said he and his team has invested a lot to improve the look and feel of DD News in the last two years, in terms of graphics, correspondents and news packages.

"The efforts made by us have yielded results. The BARC data states that the English band of DD news has 58 to 64 per cent English news viewership. It is miles ahead of other private English news channels, even during the prime-time news," he claimed. The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) classifies DD News as a Hindi news channel.

He further asserted that in the last two years, several English news viewers have migrated to DD News, because the channel remains loyal to the genre in which it is placed, which is that of a news channel.