DTH
DD Free Dish e-auction: Prasar Bharati nets Rs 395 cr from sale of 40 Free Dish DTH slots
MUMBAI: The first e-auction of Doordarshan’s FTA DTH platform, FreeDish, after recommencement witnessed intense competition. Under the revised guidelines, total of 40 MPEG2 slots were successfully sold.
Prasar Bharati CEO Shashi Shekhar Vempati said that that the estimated revenue from the sold slots is Rs. 395 crore and added that the new channels will be on air from 1 March 2019, subject to completion of formalities.
After the e-auction Vempati asserted that the language diversity on DD FreeDish has also seen an expansion with Marathi channels taking up slots.He also added that nearly eight new channels have taken up space across various categories and genres in various languages.
While revealing the new policy guidelines, Vempati had said a key consideration factored in was to increase the diversity of content available on FreeDish and to expand its reach across India, especially within the non-Hindi speaking states.
As shared by Prasar Bharati, the highest bid price in Bucket A+ was Rs 15.05 crore, in Bucket A it was Rs 12.45 crore and in Bucket B was Rs 10.95 crore. In Bucket C, which saw the toughest competition, the highest bid was Rs 8.95 crore. Bucket D saw a high of Rs 6.1 crore.
The new policy guideline has kept five buckets for e-auction of MPEG2 slots . Bucket A+ has been kept for Hindi GECs and teleshopping channels with a reserve price of Rs 15 crore, and Bucket A has been dedicated for Hindi movie channels with a reserve price of Rs 12 crore.
Hindi music, sports, and Bhojpuri GEC and movie come under Bucket B, which has a reserve price of Rs 10 crore. All news and current affairs TV channels in various languages fall under the category of Bucket C, which had a reserve price of Rs 7 crore. Bucket D with lowest reserve price of Rs 6 crore comprises all other remaining genres/language channels.
Earlier on 15 February 2019, the Prasar Bharati Board on gave a green signal to e-auctioning of DTH slots on DD FreeDish. The e-auctioning was arbitrarily called off in October 2017. Earlier, FreeDish would conduct the e-auction every couple of months to award vacant channel slots to private broadcasters. The last e-auction was held In July 2017.
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.
