For television news, the biggest threat may no longer be another television channel. It is the phone in the viewer’s hand. Breaking news now travels through social media, messaging platforms and digital creators long before it reaches a television bulletin. The harder—and potentially more valuable—job is explaining what happened, why it matters and what is known.
That is where Prasar Bharati, the country’s public broadcaster, sees room to compete.
“Breaking news is no longer what anybody comes to TV for,” CEO Gaurav Dwivedi said at FICCI Frames in Mumbai on Wednesday, in a conversation with journalist Anuradha Sengupta. “What they want to know is to get a deeper perspective.”
The shift has business implications for Doordarshan News. In a market where attention is increasingly fragmented, the public broadcaster is trying to make its nationwide reporting network an asset while adapting the way that content is packaged and distributed.
“The information is not how much you broadcast or how much you put out. It is how much the audience is able to imbibe,” Dwivedi said.
That means shorter formats, sharper presentation and more ground reporting rather than filling the day around a handful of high-decibel stories. Prasar Bharati has merged its Doordarshan and Akashvani news resources into a common pool and is distributing material through Shabd, its free news service, to nearly 4,000 media organizations, including smaller publishers and broadcasters. Independent creators can also access the service, Dwivedi said.
The strategy also extends to personalities. Defending the decision to commission a daily programme featuring journalist Sudhir Chaudhary, Dwivedi said the broadcaster was buying a production package—not paying a salary—and using a team operating under editorial oversight. Combining television and digital audiences, he said, the programme had reached second position in the 9–10 pm slot, based on the last released BARC data.
For Prasar Bharati, audience growth ultimately feeds into the larger advertising equation. Dwivedi said he hoped television advertising would continue to grow, while declining to comment on the government’s decision regarding competing television-rating currencies.
The next disruption is AI. Prasar Bharati already uses it for translation, transliteration and graphics, but Dwivedi wants AI-generated audiovisual content clearly labelled.
“There is a very, very fine line which divides properly labelled AI content from defects,” he said.
For a broadcaster trying to compete for attention without replicating television news’s loudest formats, the commercial proposition is increasingly clear: credibility has to translate into audience relevance—and audience relevance into sustainable reach.