Prasar Bharti's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jawahar Sircar on Friday welcomed the signing of an agreement between the Indian and Chinese national broadcasting networks Doordarshan and CCTV.
In a tweet, Sircar said, "the agreement between #CCTV and #Doordarshan will foster better people to people understanding #IndiaChina."
Among the 24 agreements signed between the two nations was a broadcast tie-up between Doordarshan and China's state-run CCTV.
Doordarshan is an autonomous public service broadcaster, a division of Prasar Bharati. It is one of India's largest broadcasting organisations in terms of studio and transmitter infrastructure. It had an experimental telecast in Delhi on September 15, 1959, with a small transmitter and a makeshift studio and regular daily transmission have been on since 1965.
National telecasts were introduced in 1982. In the same year, colour TV was also introduced to India with the live telecast of the Independence Day speech by then prime minister Indira Gandhi.
Now more than 90 percent of the Indian population has access to Doordarshan National) programmes through a network of nearly 1,400 terrestrial transmitters. There are about 46 Doordarshan studios producing TV programmes.
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China Central Television or Chinese Central Television, commonly abbreviated as CCTV, is the predominant state television broadcaster in mainland China. It was founded on September 2, 1958. Its parent organization is the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.
CCTV has a network of 45 channels broadcasting different programmes and is accessible to more than one billion viewers. Most of its programmes are a mixture of documentary, comedy, entertainment, and drama, the majority of which consists of Chinese soap operas and entertainment.
The organization is considered one of the "big three" media outlets in China, along with the People's Daily and Xinhua.
