DTH
DD Free Dish e-auction: Reserve price for MPEG4 slots fixed at Rs 5 lakh
MUMBAI: After recommencement of DD Free Dish e-auction, Prasar Bharati (PB) recently revealed the result where a total of 40 MPEG2 slots were successfully sold. Now, PB CEO Shashi Shekhar Vempati has revealed that the reserve price for MPEG4 slots e-auction is Rs 5 lakh. He also added that the first e-auction for MPEG4 slots will be notified in a couple of days.
“The reserve price for these MPEG4 slots is at a low invitational amount of merely Rs 5 lakh. We request all those channels that could not bid for MPEG2 slots for various reasons to consider bidding for the MPEG4 slots,” Vempati said on Twitter.
PB CEO disclosed the same while addressing the issues raised by religious channels. Various media reports floated recently that the public broadcaster has decided to keep away from religious and devotional channels for DD Free Dish slots.
The reports said spiritual channels, including that of Baba Ramdev, have been seeking slots in the auctioning for quite some time. As it could open a floodgate of applicants, the broadcaster has decide to keep a safe distance.
Vempati has taken a defensive stance saying that they have taken note of several petitions received. “Free Dish is a public platform where placement of channels happens through an open transparent e-auction process. It is the preorgative of individual channels whether to participate or not. If you feel strongly that certain channels should be on Free Dish then please write to them,” he commented.
The new policy guideline had kept five buckets for e-auction of MPEG2 slots There is no specified bucket for spiritual or regional channels under new guidelines.
Earlier on 15 February, the Prasar Bharati Board gave the green signal to e-auctioning of DTH slots on DD Free Dish. The e-auctioning of slots on DD Free Dish was arbitrarily called off in October 2017. Earlier, DD Free Dish 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.
