DTH
DD Freedish revenue from e-auctions to reach Rs 120 crore by March
NEW DELHI: Doordarshan’s free-to-air direct-to-home Freedish platform, which was telecasting 59 channels until recently has added two more channels to its kitty. What’s more, the platform is further looking at adding three more channels to its offerings soon, taking the total number of channels to 64.
In fact, another channel will come on board the platform before the end of the month, according to deputy director general C K Jain.
Clarifying the situation, Jain told Indiantlevision.com that 61 channels had been allotted and another three would be allotted shortly. The last two channels to be allotted were Sony Pal and Dillagi, which is still to go on air.
A total of 20 e-auctions have been held so far, the latest being earlier this week. DD expects to reach a target of Rs 120 crore through these auctions by the end of March this year.
Doordarshan had set a reserve price of Rs 3.7 crore per slot for the 20th online e-auction, though Indiantelevision.com learnt that the bid amount went up to Rs 4.2 crore in the 17th e-auction held on 12 November.
The attempt is to touch the target of 112 television channels in the next few months, Jain said. He said that the delay had been partly due to some technical problems, which were being sorted.
Prasar Bharati CEO Jawhar Sircar had said recently that the future of Doordarshan was in Freedish and digitisation. He had added that this may mean that some channels would have to be attracted to Freedish by means other than e-auction.
DD sources also said that while Freedish may be encrypted to keep a tab on the number of subscribers, it would however remain free-to-air.
As all these channels are on MPEG2. Freedish, which uses Insat 4B, is migrating from its old platform to a new upgraded platform with MPEG4 in an attempt to increase its capacity. The migration would result in increase of TV channels from 59 to 64 and radio channels from 22 to 24.
Sircar had said in November that while most were coming through e-auctions, some popular channels may have to be ‘attracted’ to join Freedish since satellite television was the future.
To access the upgraded platform, the viewers need to edit the transponder parameter by changing only the symbol rate from 27500Ksps to 28500 Ksps in four transponders and retune/rescan their Set Top Box (STB) to receive the upgraded TV and radio channels.
Viewers/subscribers who do not rescan their STB will continue to get ten channels for a period of seven days only from the date of upgradation. Out of these ten channels, one channel is an informative channel, which will show detailed procedure for re-tuning the STBs.
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.
