DTH
Isro sets 16 December as launch date for Insat 4A
MUMBAI: The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has informed Tata-Sky Ltd, the 80:20 joint venture between the Tatas and Rupert Murdoch-controlled Star Group, that the launch of its much delayed Insat 4A satellite has been set for 16 December.
Tata-Sky CEO Vikram Kaushik confirmed to indiantelevision.com that Isro had intimated that Insat 4A, the first in a satellite series crucial to the future of Tata-Star’s T-Sky direct to home (DTH) venture, would be launched from Kourou, French Guayana, on 16 December. Tata-Sky has booked 11 Ku band transponders on Insat 4A.
This tallies with what Isro chairman M Madhavan Nair had told newspersons in Bangalore a few days ago – that Insat 4A had already been shifted to Kourou, from where it would be launched “probably in the middle of December”. Nair made his comments while inaugurating the Edusat class room in Bangalore.
The fixing of Insat 4A’s launch date also provides a window to when Tata-Sky’s DTH service T-Sky will likely become operational. According to information available with indiantelevision.com, after launch, a satellite takes anywhere between one to two months to settle into its geostationary orbital slot. What follows then is a month of signal testing after which the service can be offered to consumers. Going by this timeline, T-Sky should become operational anytime between March and June 2006.
When queried about this, Kaushik offered no comments except to state that T-Sky would make a public statement about the launch of its service at the appropriate time.
The launch of the Insat series – 4A, 4B and 4C – over the next year or so will add 36 Ku-band transponders to Isro’s capacity. This is expected to sizably increase the number of transponders for the various DTH operators.
Kalanithi Maran’s Sun Direct, meanwhile, has booked four-six transponders in the initial phase on 4B or 4C.
DTH providers can beam a maximum of 12 channels per transponder, depending on their compression technology. The availability of transponder space would limit the channel offerings from the DTH service providers. Insat 4A and 4B have a capacity of 12 Ku band and 12 C-band transponders each. Insat 4C, on the other hand, has just 12 Ku band transponders.
Dish TV and Doordarshan’s DD Direct use the NSS 6 satellite for their DTH services.
DTH
Prasar Bharati’s WAVES earns Rs 2.9 crore in first year
Platform scales content, users but monetisation gaps limit revenue growth.
MUMBAI: Big waves, small ripples at least for now. When Prasar Bharati launched its OTT platform WAVES at the 55th International Film Festival of India in November 2024, it pitched a bold vision: a homegrown rival to global and domestic streaming giants, blending video, audio, gaming and commerce into a single digital ecosystem. Five months into FY2024–25, however, the platform’s revenue stands at just Rs 2.90 crore, a figure that underscores the gap between ambition and monetisation.
On paper, WAVES looks anything but modest. The platform has ingested 13,608 titles, totalling 9,495 hours of content, with over 13,000 titles already live. It has streamed more than 575 live events from the Mahakumbh Amrit Snan and the 76th Republic Day parade to the Hockey India League, Kabaddi World Cup and Mann Ki Baat while offering 74 live TV channels and 12 radio channels. With over 10 lakh registered users and more than 200 content partners onboarded, the scale resembles that of a fully operational streaming service rather than a pilot project.
The architecture supporting this scale is equally robust. Built under Prasar Bharati’s Central Archives vertical, WAVES runs on a cloud-based infrastructure with DRM, encryption and an integrated analytics dashboard. It includes dedicated units for content ingestion, quality control, publishing, graphics, marketing and billing, and is distributed across platforms such as OTTplay, Tata Play and BSNL. The offering extends beyond video to include audio-on-demand, e-games and even e-commerce via ONDC integration.
Yet, the numbers reveal a core disconnect. Despite its scale, WAVES generated just Rs 2.90 crore in a market where India’s OTT industry crossed Rs 23,000 crore in 2024. A key bottleneck lies in monetisation infrastructure: subscriptions cannot currently be purchased within the app and must be completed via an external website. In a mobile-first country where over 95 per cent of OTT consumption happens on smartphones, this extra step creates friction that most users are unlikely to overcome.
Ironically, content is not the problem, it is the platform’s biggest strength. Prasar Bharati holds one of the world’s richest broadcast archives, including 45,154 hours of digitised Akashvani programming and 35,723 hours from Doordarshan. For WAVES alone, over 3,800 hours of archival content have been made OTT-ready, including classics such as Ramayan and Shaktimaan, alongside rare cultural recordings and historical broadcasts.
There are early signs that this library holds commercial potential. Revenue from archival content licensing rose sharply to Rs 3.38 crore in FY24, up from Rs 67 lakh the previous year. Meanwhile, free digital platforms continue to drive massive reach, the PB Archives Youtube channel clocked 119.78 million views and added 4,02,000 subscribers in FY2024–25, crossing 1.7 million in total, while DD News has over 5.84 million subscribers.
That, however, presents a strategic dilemma. While free distribution builds scale, it also conditions audiences to expect content at zero cost making it harder to transition to paid models. WAVES, designed as a hybrid AVOD-SVOD platform with advertising and subscription layers, is yet to fully crack this balance.
The broader challenge is not technological but strategic. In an ecosystem dominated by platforms offering seamless payments, aggressive pricing and high-budget originals, WAVES is still bridging the gap between being a content repository and a commercially viable product.
For now, the platform reflects both promise and paradox. It has the scale, the content and the infrastructure but until monetisation catches up, WAVES remains less a revenue engine and more a digital showcase of what India’s public broadcaster could become.
