Union Minister Shri Thakur said that today was a historic day for the information and broadcasting sector of the country. “Over the years, Prasar Bharti has cultivated an elaborate network of news gathering from as well as news delivery to every corner of the country in every regional language. Now we intend to share this accurate and meaningful content with the rest of the print and electronic media industry of India”, he said. The Minister further added that the news organizations will be provided with clean feed and will not have carry the logo of Doordarshan. This feed will curate content from all corners of the country in various languages. This will revolutionize the news industry and will massively support the smaller news organizations that do not have the benefit of an extensive network for content gathering. PB-SHABD will be a single point source of news content for all such organizations, he said.
The Minister further informed that the SHABD service is being offered free of cost for the first year as an introductory offer and will provide news stories in all major Indian languages across fifty categories.
Speaking about the revamped websites of Doordarshan News and All India Radio and the NewsOnAIR app, Shri Thakur said that All India Radio has continued to remain immensely relevant in the age of extensive mobile connectivity and is still a source of accurate information about government schemes and policies. The app will have many new features like Personalized news feeds, push notifications for breaking news, multimedia content integration, offline reading capability, live streaming for real-time coverage, easy social media sharing, location-based news delivery, bookmarking for saving articles and powerful search functionality
Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Shri Sanjay Jaju, speaking earlier congratulated the whole Prasar Bharti team for the pilot of SHABD and the new website and app launches. He further said that the portal will create a lot of synergy and will be beneficial in dissemination of meaningful news content across the country.
CEO, Prasar Bharti, Shri Gaurav Dwivedi said that Prasar Bharti will make an outreach to media organisations and share audio, video, photo and text based information gathered by its network.
