DTH
Biggest threat to Indonesia’s DTH & Pay TV market is piracy: Tanoesoedibjo
MUMBAI: While there may have been disruptive pricing and piracy issues that haunt the Indonesian pay TV market, the potential in the country is enormous.
According to Indonesian satellite Pay TV company MNC Sky Vision’s president and director Rudy Tanoesoedibjo, the industry faces three key hurdles, which are stagnating growth. Outlining the three key points he says that piracy has been the biggest threat to the pay TV and Direct to Home (DTH) market.
“We work very hard to fight piracy and we get very good support from the channels to stop piracy,” Tanoesoedibjo says. He was speaking at the recently held Asia Pacific Operators Summit (APOS) 2015 in Bali.
Tanoesoedibjo further adds that the other two reasons are inter related to the content of the channels in Indonesia. “We are experiencing what India was experiencing in the past. In India, it was called call rotational subscribers while we call it recycle subscribers. The same set of new subscribers come in once again every three to four months, as new subscribers like a rotational churn thanks to an ‘unhealthy’ free offering for new subscribers. A single subscriber jumps from one operator to another,” he says.
The third reason behind the stagnant growth, according to Tanoesoedibjo, is severe because of a new practice adopted by some operators in the country. “Operators do not shut off non-paying subscribers. We have had instances where people only pay one time and continue with the service. This threatens the growth,” he laments before adding, “this is a structural problem and we can only solve it with the participation of the channels.”
To battle the menace of piracy, MNC Sky Vision is currently fighting approximately 36 cases in court. The company has three brands namely Indovision, Top TV and Oke Vision under its umbrella. The good news here is that MNC Sky Vision has managed to crack one the biggest player, which had 75,000 subscribers.
Talking about the scale of opportunity for DTH players in Indonesia, Tanoesoedibjo opines that the opportunity is large enough with a market size of 40-50 million subscribers and the pipe can grow further. “Currently the pipe is stagnant,” he informs.
Going forward, MNC Sky Vision is planning to offer more High Definition (HD) channels in the country and will also be moving soon to MPEG-5.
“It doesn’t matter if the Set Top Box (STB) is MPEG2, MPEG 3, MPEG 5, HD or even Standard Definition (SD), as the price difference is only one or two dollars. We will be move to MPEG 5 by the end of the year,” he says.
Throwing light on the dilemma of whether Over the Top (OTT) and DTH players can co-exist peacefully, Tanoesoedibjo says that DTH operators need to evolve in order to survive. “DTH operators think with a traditional mindset that they just provide access to content via their technology for customers. We should not forget that at the end of the day, we do not have control of content. We are only a pipe,” he informs.
Calling new technology that can deliver content faster, efficiently and cheaper than a DTH operator, a threat, Tanoesoedibjo says that in that scenario operators will have to expand, introduce better technology and new means of delivery such as OTT platforms.
“We have already launched our alternate OTT, and are also preparing our stand alone OTT services next. But maybe in the next five months there will bea new means of delivery,” he mulls.
On a concluding note Tanoesoedibjo says that operators need to pay attention in creating their own content. “We now have our own content for 20 channels. At the end of the day we deliver content. But if someone else finds an easier way to deliver it, then DTH needs to watch and be more effective,” he cautions.
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.
