DTH
Dish TV slates two exclusive soccer channels
NEW DELHI: Dish TV, India’s first Direct-to-Home (DTH) service, has given football lovers in India cause to celebrate as it has added two ‘lifestyle football’ channels, Goal TV 1 and Goal TV 2, to its bouquet.
The deal relating to Goal TV, a dedicated football platform offering Asian audiences coverage of top European soccer, is for distribution in India.
Football fans in India can now watch the two channels dedicated to the sport, 24 hours a day. With the addition, the total strength of television channels offered by Dish TV has gone up to 112, an official statement of Dish TV stated today.
Goal TV 1 showcases Manchester United, Arsenal and the Live Scottish Premier League, Goal TV 2 brings Chelsea, Liverpool, Live Dutch, Live French and the UEFA Champions League of the four clubs to the viewers. The comprehensive coverage includes live soccer from three major European leagues as well as behind-the-scenes access to England’s Big Four clubs: Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool.
Dish TV CEO Sunil Khanna was quoted in the statement saying, “This one is especially for the thousands of football dedicated fans in our country. For the people who are passionate about the game, Goal TV is the right destination. As our tag-line goes, DishTV is all about enjoying your passion. With this addition, we have taken another step towards providing quality and niche entertainment in the country.”
The subscription prices for the channels, offered on the ? la carte platform, will be announced soon.
According to Goal TV CEO Thomas Kressner, “It was a natural association between the two: DishTV is all about being passionate about your interests, and Goal TV is dedicated to passionate football fans. Given the popularity of football in Asia and the fact that we provide dedicated club programming, as well as all the season’s big matches, Goal TV channels are catering to millions of dedicated fans in the continent and can be seen in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Shanghai and Macau.”
Goal TV, according to the statement, delivers over 65 per cent original content; 200 hours every week.
DishTV is India’s first DTH service and allows consumers access to a variety of digital television channels directly from the satellite. Dish TV is an Essel Group venture.
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.
