DTH
Space TV gets DTH LoI
MUMBAI: Not “in a day or two” but in a few hours is how it finally panned out. The information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry this evening handed over the long awaited letter of intent (LoI) to a representative from Tata’s Delhi office.
The LoI, to be followed by a formal license, will enable Space TV, the 80:20 joint venture between Tata and Star, to commercially launch its Rs 16 billion ku band direct-to-home (DTH) service by the end of 2005, an official release stated.
The release quoted Vikram Kaushik, CEO, Space TV as saying, “We are very excited that the clearance has been awarded. Both partners, Tata and Star, are fully committed to invest in building a high quality digital infrastructure in the country to offer a world class television viewing experience to Indian households. We believe the service will immensely enhance the choices of viewers looking for the best of pay television services in the country.”
One clear mandate that Space TV has before it is to make its DTH service “India’s largest digital television platform, offering consumers a wide array of programming choices with interactive features and superior picture and sound quality.”
Before it can achieve that goal, it has some catching up to do first. The Subhash Chandra-promoted Dish TV has had a clear head start as the first player to enter the segment in October 2003 while pubcaster Prasar Bharati, launched its free-to-air platform ‘DD Direct+’ in December 2004.
Contacted by Indiantelevision.com, a senior executive of Dish TV, which is 20 per cent owned by Zee Telefilms, welcomed the LoI issued to Space TV, saying, “Competition will benefit the consumer at the end of the day.”
With the entry of Space TV and Sun DirectTV (Sun Group’s proposed DTH platform), there will be a total of four players in the Indian DTH arena. Currently Dish TV claims to have about 200,000 subscribers while Prasar Bharati boasts of over two million subscribers.
Speaking of Sun DirectTV, while it can be assumed that it too got the LoI, indiantelevision.com was unable to get an official confirmation on this from Kalanidhi Maran’s network at the time of filing this report.
The handing over of the LoIs follows the confirmation by newly appointed information and Broadcasting secretary S K Arora earlier in the day that his ministry would be issuing “in a day or two” letters of intent relating to the DTH licence of Space TV and Sun DirectTV. The scrutiny “process is complete” as all queries have been satisfactorily answered by the applicants, Arora had said during a media briefing in the afternoon.
AIADMK MP MOVES COURT AGAINST DTH LoI TO SUN TV
The Press Trust of India has reported that an AIADMK member of Parliament today moved the Madras High Court to restrain the Centre from processing Sun TV’s DTH application citing the “Competitive Act 2002.
When the PIL by PG Narayanan, AIADMK leader in the Rajya Sabha, came up for hearing, a division bench comprising Justice Prabha Sridevan and Justice C Nagappan directed the Union ministries of company affairs, home, communications and information technology and Sun TV to file counter affidavits in response to the petition by 24 May, PTI has reported.
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.
