DTH
DD Free Dish looks at advertising for monetisation
MUMBAI: The government’s own direct-to-home (DTH) platform DD Free Dish has had a good run since launch because of its wide acceptance, especially in the rural areas where the reach of cable is limited and pay TV is expensive. Now, the government is drawing up plans to make money from the platform.
Last year, the government sanctioned a scheme to extend the number of channels to up to 250. In a reply in the Lok Sabha recently, Minister of State in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) Rajyavardhan Rathore said that this would enable Free Dish to generate revenue via advertisements. Quoting a private newspaper, the response mentions that private channels easily garner Rs 500-700 crore as revenue a year while a channel slot on Free Dish is as low as Rs 6-8 crore. He admitted that there were limitations to the revenue models that could be adapted into the free service if it wanted to ensure quality and reach.
Another means of making money is via auction of channel slots on the DTH platform, which turned into a legal case when the auctions were arbitrarily called off mid last year by Smriti Irani, the information and broadcasting minister. Auctions have been kept in abeyance till a settlement is reached between Prasar Bharati and the networks that have reached out to the Telecom Disputes Settlement Appellate Tribunal. The tribunal has asked the government to conduct a comprehensive review on the auctioning policy for Free Dish before any stand is taken.
At present, there are 72 free channels and 39 radio stations available on Free Dish.
Updating the parliament on its growth, Rathore added that about 66,000 DTH set-top boxes have been given out in tribal, remote and border areas. According to estimates, Free Dish’s total subscriber base is 22 million.
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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.
