DTH
Customers are in an omnichannel world now, reaching them is a lot more complex: Tata Sky’s Anurag Kumar
KOLKATA: India’s undisputed DTH leader Tata Sky unveiled a digital campaign to celebrate its 14 anniversary recently. Of all other usual campaigns, it stands out in its approach of keeping consumers at the heart of the video. Rather than boasting of success with putting a few numbers together, the company has conveyed its journey through its loyal subscribers. While it has invoked a sense of authenticity, Tata Sky chief communication officer Anurag Kumar reiterated more empathy, more authenticity, talking about community, the family in communication are making it easier to connect with consumers in the post-Covid2019 period.
To get a sense of the campaign, Tata Sky’s challenges and opportunities going forward, we caught up with Kumar. He shared that when they were ideating about what would be the best way to reach consumers, they thought of going back to subscribers who have been a part of the brand’s journey for a long time. The subscribers spoke their mind, did not read a script given by the company, and the videos were shot on the phone.
According to Kumar, such pieces of content created around consumers have greater engagement on social media platforms while TVC would have been one-way. Hence, the company opted for a digital campaign. Even so, the campaign was put up on Tata Sky’s landing page for a short period of time. The video on the digital medium has garnered 23 million impressions and 5.9 million views within seven days.
“I think what we have seen in lockdown is the desire to care about the community and the family has increased. People are more aware of who is around them, they are helping each other a lot. Hence, what we have found is that communication which will be conveyed with sympathy for consumers, authenticity in terms representing real life, what the customer is going through, how they are at home, that is connecting much better in the post-Covid2019 period than before. communication filled with more empathy, more authenticity, talking about community, the family is connecting more,” Kumar opined.
While pandemic is accelerating an overall change, the media and entertainment industry has already started facing an overhaul of the ecosystem. Standing at the critical juncture, Tata Sky is treating OTT as a friend rather than foe. While it has forayed into the video-on-demand market through Tata Sky Binge, Kumar said the overall challenge is now how do they make the brand as phenomenal for OTT as it has been for live TV.
He shared their approach to counter that challenge. Tata Sky is an expert at aggregating content and brings it to consumers. Now, it is looking at bringing the same kind of convenience and aggregation to OTT. “We have to continuously innovate, try to be relevant in future, from a TV point of view and OTT point of view,” Kumar contended. He said along with opportunities in OTT, pay-TV still has opportunities with 100 million TV unpenetrated households.
There are challenges in the industry along with opportunities. Kumar said the regulatory uncertainty, that industry faces, is a big challenge As a result of frequent regulatory changes, the entire relationship between the various players in the value chain has to be evolved constantly resulting in a change in the business model, customer selling strategy, customer management approach.
“The other challenge is a significant cost and investment which we have to spend to reach consumers via media as it is expensive in India. Earlier, it was TV and print while now there are so many platforms. The customer is actually in an omnichannel world now. If we want to reach a consumer that is a lot more complex now. It is true even for sales as they can go to e-commerce, a physical dealer can contact the call centre. Hence, reaching the consumer in an efficient way via media and physical channels is a challenge. It’s not insurmountable, but it is something which we have to keep in mind,” Kumar commented.
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.
