(Repeating yesterday's DI10)

New Delhi, Oct 2 (UNI) Almost all archives of All India Radio(AIR) have been digitised, though digitisation of Doordarshan treasures is going rather at a slow pace due to lack of funds, according to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

The AIR had taken up a massive digitisation programme covering both production and transmission much earlier than Doordarshan.

''Every record of AIR whether spoken word or song has been digitised and now it is a question of making products out of that,'' the Ministry has told a Parliamentary panel.

However, digitisation of Doordarshan archives has been hampered due to lack of funds and also lack of attention, the Ministry said.

''Unfortunately, this is an area that was not given the requisite focus,'' the Ministry said.

It said the programme was totally funded by Prasar Bharati's internal resources as it failed to get any funds from the Government.

Doordarshan Central Archives has approximately 70,000 hours of analogue videotapes, out of which only 1400 hrs have so far been digitised but a detailed plan has been drawn up for digitisation of all its holdings as the analogue technology was phasing out.

The future plan includes facilitating broadband convergence, commercial exploitation of the archives, printing DVDS, CDs and VCDs to provide more flexibility to viewers, making the treasure available to India diaspora and cultural institutions in the country and abroad.

Doordarshan has so far released 51 titles in the market. As many as 600 titles have been identified for the DD MTNL broadband project. These are exclusive contents relating to culture, travel, personalities, historical places, health, fitness lifestyles and crafts.

As far as the AIR was concerned, the analogue equipment in many radio stations has been replaced by state-of-the-art digital equipment. Computer based recording, editing and playback system has been provided at 141 AIR stations.

Now the existing analog, uplink and downlink facilities, are being upgraded to digital system.

New digital uplinks have been set up at Ranchi, Raipur, Jallandhar, Almora and Kolkata.

Existing uplinks have been upgraded to digital system at Guwahati, Shillong, Itanagar, Lucknow, Srinagar, Patna, Jaipur, Cuttack, Shimla, Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Bhopal.

Upgradation of existing uplinks at Delhi and Mumbai was also in progress and would be completed soon.

UNI NAZ MIR RAI1452