The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued its recommendations on “Reserve Price for Auction of FM Radio Channels” across 283 cities in the country under Phase 3 of FM expansion policy. These include 23 existing cities where frequencies remined unsold in the previous two phases of auctions.
In August 2019, TRAI had been asked by the Information & Broadcasting ministry for its recommendations on the reserve prices.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) then released a consultation paper to seek comments from stakeholders to finalise the methodology for setting reserve prices for the auction of the third batch of private FM radio frequencies, under the Phase III policy.
Reserve price for new channels in these existing Phase-II cities was fixed as the highest bid price received for that city in Phase-II. TRAI asked stakeholders if this methodology needs to be changed.
The last date for submission of the comments was November 6, 2019 and that of the counter-comments was November 13, 2019.
TRAI received 10 comments, which are available on its website. This was followed by an Open House Discussion on January 8, 2020 in Delhi, to seek the views of the stakeholders on various issues.
On Saturday, it recommended that the reserve price for FM radio channels for 273 new cities has been fixed at 80 per cent of the valuation for each city except for the cities situated in North East (NE) region, Jammu and Kashmir for which reserve price has been fixed at 40 per cent of the valuation for each city.
The valuation of channels in these 273 cities has been worked out as a simple mean of the three valuation approaches which are based on population of the city, per capita gross state domestic product, listenership of FM Radio, per capita gross revenue earned by the existing FM Radio operators, and market intensity index of various cities.
For 10 cities of ‘Others’ category, having a population less than 1 lakh in the border areas of Jammu & Kashmir and the North East region, the reserve price is kept at Rs 5 lakh for each channel of each city.
Existing ceiling limit of 15% of total FM Radio channels in the country for excluding such permission holder to participate in FM radio auction has been done away with.
Auction of remaining channels of Phase-III should be done by delinking them from technology. Broadcasters should be permitted to use any technology (analog or digital or both) for radio broadcasting in the frequency allocated to them through auction in future.
In case Radio broadcasters opt for digital technology, they should be permitted to broadcast more than one channel subject to technical feasibility on single frequency allocated to them.