Union Minister Prakash Javadekar inaugurated Video Walls in all eight Doordarshan Studios and Earth Station at DD Kendra, Delhi today.Speaking on the occasion, Shri Prakash Javadekar highlighted the significance of the Video Walls in enhancing viewer experience. He said that under the three year Action Plan of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, support has been given to Doordarshan to modernise its infrastructure. Addition of State of Art Video Walls and Spectrum efficient Satellite equipment, is a step in the direction of revamping the Public Service Broadcaster. Appreciating the role of Doordarshan, he stated that the channel is synonymous with credibility. He asked the officials present to work towards expanding the spread of DD Free Dish from the current 3.25 crore households to 5 crore households. On this occasion, he also announced that Creative Head will soon be brought in for DD to give a further boost to programming and high quality content creation.Secretary, Ministry of I&B Shri Amit Khare said that the Government is committed to support Doordarshan and All India Radio in every possible way to ensure that the Public Service Broadcaster is able to provide services of contemporary industry standards, reaching out to every nook and corner of India.
A Surya Prakash, Chairman, Prasar Bharati lauded the efforts of Doordarshan and highlighted that in the recent past a number of impactful and meaningful programmes have been created, which have taken the Flagship Schemes of the Government to the door steps of people.The State-of-Art Video Walls, installed at a cost of Rs 10.75 Crores under the three year Action Plan of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, are at par with those in studio centres of leading International Broadcasters. The induction of Video walls will save a lot of time in physical erection of Sets. Further, it will give greater flexibility through dynamic change of backdrop by introducing live/recorded videos, graphics etc. in studio sets as per program requirement.The Earth Station, which is based on spectrum efficient technology, will result in increasing capacity to almost double the number of channels in the same bandwidth. The new Earth Station is HD capable and can give all the national channels of DD in HD. This state of art Earth Station will enable DD to save cost on teleport of DD channels and also allow inclusion of new channels in DD bouquet.
Earth Station Background
The satellite uplink facility of 9 channels of DDK Delhi, also called as Earth Station was commissioned in 2007. The technology available those days was not spectrum efficient and the compression technique used earlier was MPEG-2 in DVB-S format which resulted in spectrum utilisation of approx. 4 MHz per channel. In order to replace the old outdated and obsolete equipment and also save precious spectrum, the compression chain of the Earth Station is now replaced with state of art new equipment which uses MPEG-4 compression and DVBS-2 standards resulting into reducing bandwidth requirement per channel to half i.e. 2 MHz per channel.This spectrum efficient technology will result in increasing capacity of the Earth Station to almost double the number of channels in the same bandwidth.