@wdfindiaDelhi In this video, I am describing the start the of digital radio service by All India Radio to extend the Delhi FM service to Middle East and North East Africa. In the beginning of 2000, few discussions were held among Shri Rajiv Rattan Shah, CEO, Prasar Bharati, Shri H. M. Joshi, Engineer-in-Chief, Dr. H. O. Srivastava, Director and other senior officers. It was decided to hire space on transponder of Afristar World Space satellite, world’s first satellite radio network, to implement this service. The modalities were worked out by Dr. Srivastava and the MOU was signed on 24th May, 2000 between CEO Prasar Bharati and Mr. Harold Adam, President and Chief Operating Officer, WorldSpace, who flew from Washington, USA to Delhi. The service was inaugurated by Madam Sushma Swaraj, Minister of Information & Broadcasting from Broadcasting House, New Delhi and became operational on Aug. 15, 2000. With an additional beam taken in Feb 2002 on Asiastar serving south east countries, AIR served most of the countries in Asia and Africa with high quality digital music. The WorldSpace satellite radio with capability to deliver multimedia services had potential to provide education and healthcare apart from high quality music. AIR Resources wanted to explore these as a business. It found that many of the private broadcasters such as Sahara, Airtel, music companies etc. were interested in using the platform for broadcasting different genres apart from music such as news on radio, which is still not allowed in India for private broadcasters. The biggest gap was that of uplink from India to foreign satellite which was not permitted. AIR Resources and WorldSpace agreed to sign a MOU with the understanding that AIR would provide space in Broadcasting house, New Delhi to WorldSpace who would set up Uplinks to the Asiastar and Afristar satellites. This could save the cost being incurred by Prasar Bharati on sending the signal from New Delhi to Singapore for its existing services. Further, the MOU provided for sharing revenue with World Space for uplinking by private broadcasters willing to use WorldSpace service. Subsequently Prasar Bharati shared its DTH platform with private broadcasters by leasing its uplink and transponder space.

• published: 19 Jun 2021
• views: 116