How DD insured against glitches

Source: The Indian Express | Written by Raghvendra Rao | New Delhi
May 30, 2014

SUMMARY

The only fee DD will charge is from Mauritius and Sri Lanka, which have used DD's facilities to transmit feeds generated by their respective TV crews.

Doordarshan's live coverage of Monday's swearing-in ceremony went off smoothly but there had been a lot that the broadcaster thought could have gone wrong and had prepared for.

One worry came when senior engineers found there was possibility of a "sun outage" between 3 and 7 pm; the swearing-in was to begin at 6 pm. A sun outage is essentially an interruption in satellite signals due to interference from solar radiation.

"To ensure that our coverage continued without a hitch, we used two digital satellite news gathering vans to send separate signals to two satellites — INSAT 3A and INSAT 4B. These satellites then sent two different signals to our master switch room where our personnel chose the better quality signal," DD Kendra Delhi's deputy director general S N Singh told The Indian Express. "The use of two satellites and two exclusive signals — though both signals had the same footage — gave us a back-up to deal with the eventuality of a sun outage."

Again, the day before the swearing-in, DD officials were told the ceremony might have to be shifted indoors to............

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