DTH
Aastha plans to launch in UK
MUMBAI: Aastha Broadcasting Network is planning to launch its international spiritual channel Aastha on the direct-to-home (DTH) platform in the UK market. This follows the channel launch in the US on the DirecTV platform a month back.
The company is in the process of applying for a license. “We have decided that UK will be our next stop. And we will be on the DTH system,” says Aastha Broadcasting Network director Hiren Doshi.
Aastha’s step into the global market is seen as a drive to generate pay revenues even as there is very little scope for spiritual channels to augment advertising revenues in the Indian market. In the US, the channel is priced at $14.99 a month per subscriber.
The international channel is a mix of content from its two Indian entities – Aastha and Aastha 2. While Aastha is a spiritual channel with focus on discourses and live Yoga demonstrations, Aastha 2 airs Bhajans and Kirtans. Currently, Aastha has its footprints available across 160 countries.
Meanwhile, CMM Broadcasting Network, a listed firm, has been rechristened as Aastha Broadcasting Network Ltd. CMM Music channel closed down operations in mid-2004, replacing it with Aastha 2.
“CMM Music was discontinued because we wanted to be only in the spirituality space. Our single spiritual channel (Aastha) wasn’t enough to telecast all our content. In CMM Music, we had a well-distributed frequency. So we decided to replace CMM Music with Aastha 2,” says Doshi.
Aastha broadcasts programming in Hindi, Gujarati and English. This year, the channel has plans to air locally originated programming as well.
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.
