DTH
Broadband growth ups demand for premium online content in North America
MUMBAI: Rapidly rising broadband penetration in North America has set the stage for increased demand and rapid growth of premium or paid online content applications such as music, gaming and video/movies. This is bringing in opportunities for the consumer broadband market and participants that can identify and deliver compelling content to their customers.
This market has earned revenues of $2.45 billion in 2005 and is likely to exceed $10 billion in 2012, suggests the findings from Frost & Sullivan (www.frost.com/communicationsservices) analysis North American Residential Online Content Services Markets.
“For mainstream consumers, online content has been inextricably linked to Internet usage and rising broadband penetration is further cementing this bond,” notes Frost & Sullivan research analyst Piyush Arora. “As broadband service providers continue to enhance speeds and bandwidth limits for their subscribers, new opportunities are cropping up in terms of content applications that can be delivered on these fast connections.”
Premium online content applications such as music, video/movies and gaming offer broadband service providers a competitive advantage in a market where participants have largely competed on speed and pricing. Providing content can also help service providers sell ‘triple play’ or ‘quadruple play’ service bundles to customers.
The study indicates tha online gaming is undoubtedly the most popular of these applications, currently accounting for the bulk of market revenues, at 59 percent. Music and video are fast catching up and becoming popular among broadband consumers. At present, online music and video revenues constitute 34 percent and 7 percent, respectively, of the total paid content market revenue, informs an official release.
However, a key challenge facing all market participants is the need to strictly control unauthorized on-line content distribution as well as the piracy of copyright protected content. A related challenge is to ensure that the various competing digital rights management (DRM) technologies and standards, needed for the legal distribution of digital content, are compatible with each other. Currently, the leading on-line content distributors and device vendors use different proprietary standards.
In 2004, the loss to the U.S. music industry due to illegal file sharing exceeded a massive $2 billion, which demonstrated the seriousness of this challenge. Unless the rights of artists and other copyright owners are protected, content owners – including music recording companies and movie studios – are not likely to consider the Internet on an equal footing with traditional media.
“Online content distributors and specialist content providers must therefore, continue to collaborate with content owners, technology companies, broadband service providers and other stakeholders to curb the illegal distribution of digital content,” says Arora. “The online music market has already benefited from these efforts, which can reap similar results in the emerging video market as well.”
Moreover, participants must take concrete steps to resolve the DRM interoperability issues, to encourage consumers to actively use the Internet as a mainstream medium for accessing paid content.
North American Residential Online Content Services Markets, part of the Communications Services Subscription, provides an analysis of the current and future market for premium or paid online content services and applications along with the key market drivers and restraints and industry challenges faced by various stakeholders in the industry.
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.
