DTH
DD Free Dish announces new channel numbers effective 1 April
Mumbai: Prasar Bharati’s free direct-to-home (DTH) platform DD Free Dish has announced the new channel numbers for 167 TV channels and 48 radio channels that will come into effect from 1 April. The TV channels comprise 91 Doordarshan channels including 51 cobranded educational channels and 76 private TV channels.
The private TV channels bouquet comprises eight Hindi general entertainment channels, 15 Hindi movie channels, six music channels, 22 news channels, 9 Bhojpuri channels, four devotional channels and two foreign channels.
“The new channel lineup has rendered the DD Free Dish bouquet more diverse and engaging than ever,” said the statement.
Chef Sanjeev Kapoor’s dedicated food channel ‘Food Food’ has been added along with a new sports channel ‘MyCam.’
In the latest e-auction for allotment of MPEG-2 slots of DD Free Dish, 63 channels were successfully allocated slots in various genres. The number of channels on DD Free Dish has also increased under multiple buckets this year. In the news and current affairs category, the number of channels has increased from 11 to 14, while the bucket of Hindi music, Hindi sports, Hindi teleshopping channels, Bhojpuri movies and Bhojpuri GEC has registered growth from 13 to 16.
“With improved auction processes leading to addition of better quality and quantity of channels in various genres, between 2017 and 2022 alone, the free DTH service of Doordarshan clocked a stellar growth of almost 100 per cent from 22 million in 2017 to 43 million in 2022,” said the statement.
“DD Free Dish has become the largest DTH platform with a reach of more than 43 million households,” said the statement.
This year’s FICCI-EY report found that free television continued to grow its base to reach an estimated 43 million subscribers on the back of less expensive TV sets, economic issues, and the addition of new channels to the platform. The report also quoted Free Dish distributors mentioning the year-on-year growth in sales of DD Free Dish set-top-boxes.
“In stark comparison to 22 million subscribers in 13 years between 2004 and 2017, DD Free Dish’s growth over the last five years stands out,” said the statement. “In just five years between 2017 and 2022, Free Dish has added another 21 million subscribers, taking the total to 43 million.”
The DD Free Dish set-top-box can be purchased for a one-time fee of Rs 2000 where the viewer does not have to pay any monthly subscription fee.
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.
