Doordarshan makes debut in high definition broadcast with Zubin Mehta concert

The Zubin Mehta concert in Srinagar on Saturday will be India's debut in high definition broadcast on the international platform. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Sep 5, 2013, 19:48:49 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Zubin Mehta concert in Srinagar on Saturday will be India's debut in high definition broadcast on the international platform.

India's public broadcaster - Doordarshan - for the first time will indigenously telecast the show live on high definition (HD) across 40 nations from Shalimar Garden on the banks of picturesque Dal Lake after tasting failure during the Commonwealth Games.

The HD signal has viewing clarity of six times the normal standard definition (SD). Most events in the developed countries are shown on HD whereas SD is a technology of the developing world.

The public broadcaster had ordered high definition cameras and outstation broadcasting (OB) vans and decided to have HD compliant studios - one each in Delhi and Mumbai - for the games.

The equipment had reached after the games and the studios were completed only recently. As a result, production of the games was outsourced to a London based company SIS Live.

Almost three years after the games got over, DD is finally equipped to telecast an event on high definition as done in most of the developed countries.

Its first test would be with Mehta's concert, which will be shared with the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation and Euro-Vision for telecast for broadcast in different European countries.

"Everybody associated with the telecast is a Doordarshan person," Prasar Bharati chief executive officer Jawahar Sircar told HT before leaving for Srinagar to over-see the preparations.

About 100 personnel from DD studios across India had been roped in for the 90 minute mega-show with Bollywood actress Gul Panag as an anchor.

German ambassador in India Michael Steiner was initially sceptical about DD's capability to broadcast the show - Ehsaas-e-Kashmir - but Sircar assured that international quality feed will be generated without any foreign technical assistance.

DD got in touch with German international public broadcaster DW (Deutsche Welle) and got acquaintaned with the latest international best practices. "We were able to comply with strict requirements for international broadcast," Sircar said.

The public broadcaster's preparation for the show is bigger than for an international cricket match. In all, 14 high-definition cameras will deployed to provide signals from all angles. Two OB vans have been dispatched to Srinagar to provide uninterrupted coverage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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