DTH
Dish TV India-C21Media launch Content India 2025 to elevate Indian content
MUMBAI: In the chaos of India’s vibrant yet often disorganised digital landscape lies a reservoir of untapped potential—a creative powerhouse waiting to command global attention. With content exploding across platforms and talent overflowing, the challenge has been bridging local brilliance with international collaborations. Now, a groundbreaking initiative promises to declutter this overwhelming abundance and spotlight India’s creative strength on the world map.
Content India 2025—a landmark partnership between Dish TV India and UK-based C21Media. Designed to harness India’s innovation and storytelling capabilities, this initiative aims to position the country as a global content hub, showcasing its prowess in production, post-production, and creative collaboration.
At a time when India’s digital content creation market is projected to surge from $1,538.8 million in 2023 to $4,403.5 million by 2030, according to a report by Grand View Research, this platform arrives as a much-needed catalyst to organise, streamline, and celebrate India’s boundless entertainment talent.
By fostering global partnerships and promoting fresh narratives, Content India 2025 stands poised to redefine India’s creative footprint—transforming it into the content epicenter it deserves to be.
Scheduled for 1-3 April 2025, Content India will blend a marketplace, conferences, and networking opportunities, providing a platform for creators, producers, distributors, platforms, and channels to connect. The summit will set the stage for a larger Content India 2026 event, modelled on the success of C21Media’s Content London and Content Americas.
Dish TV India, CEO & executive director, Manoj Dobhal highlighted the initiative’s significance, “The Indian entertainment industry is at a critical juncture, with its content resonating like never before across international audiences. Content India 2025 is our effort to empower Indian creators and bring global opportunities closer to home. By fostering innovation and collaboration, we aim to position India as a global content powerhouse and pave the way for sustainable growth in the industry.”
With a robust ecosystem comprising 582+ channels, 21 OTT platforms, and advanced technological capabilities, Dish TV India is well-placed to drive this initiative. Content India 2025 will provide a comprehensive platform to expand markets, equip Indian creators to meet global demand, and propel Indian entertainment to the forefront of the international content landscape.
C21Media editor-in-chief & MD, David Jenkinson emphasised the partnership’s value, “India’s entertainment industry holds immense potential to lead the global content landscape with its creativity and innovation. Partnering with Dish TV India for Content India allows us to bring together the best minds in the industry, fostering collaborations that drive meaningful growth and unlock new opportunities for content creators on an international scale.”
This collaboration underscores Dish TV India’s commitment to enabling sustainable growth and innovation, ensuring Indian content achieves global recognition.
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.
