DTH
Dish TV India to convene 33rd AGM on 30 November
Mumbai: Dish TV India has informed its shareholders that its board of directors has approved the convening of the 33rd Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 30 November after a resolution was passed by the board on 7 November.
On 29 October, the company had applied to the Registrar of Companies, Mumbai seeking an extension till 31 December to convene the AGM.
Dish TV India had first sought an extension of the AGM in a notice submitted on 19 September. The AGM was previously scheduled to be held on 27 September. In its notice to the BSE, the company applied for the extension to ensure compliance with a notice sent by Dish TV India’s largest shareholder Yes Bank.
In another development, the crime branch in Gautam Buddh Nagar (a district in Uttar Pradesh) has sent a notice to Dish TV India on 6 November, restricting Yes Bank from dealing in/and or exercising any rights over equity shares of Dish TV India held by Yes Bank until completion of an investigation being conducted by them. More details on the investigation are awaited.
Yes Bank, which has a 25.63 per cent shareholding in Dish TV India had sought the removal of directors of the company including managing director Jawaher Lal Goel and independent directors Dr. Rashmi Aggarwal, Bhagwan Das Narang, Shankar Agarwal, and Ashok Mathai Kurien.
The bank had proposed the appointment of a new board including Akash Suri, Sanjay Nambiar, Vijay Bhatt, Haripriya Padmanabhan, Girish Paranjape, Narayan Vasudeo Prabhutendulkar, and Arvind Nachaya Mapangada.
Dish TV India board rejected the EGM notice by Yes Bank stating that a resolution to reconstitute the board can only be placed post receipt of approval from the ministry of information and broadcasting and other requisite approvals for appointment of new directors, within statutory guidelines.
Yes Bank moved National Company Law Tribunal Mumbai with a petition to call for an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) of shareholders of Dish TV India and pass its resolution.
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.
