DTH
Dish TV to unveil new promo scheme
MUMBAI: Now you can actually get a DTH service and also get paid to flaunt it. Dish TV is all set to unveil a promotional scheme on these lines with an eye on significantly increasing the pace of ramp up of its subscriber base.
With the festive season around the corner, Dish TV, 20 per cent owned by Zee Telefilms, will offer new customers its services for Rs 3,990 and a gift voucher worth Rs 4,000 as an additional sweetener.
This new scheme, which becomes effective from 3 October, follows the marketing initiative launched a few months ago called ‘har chaat per dish’ (a dish on every rooftop) wherein Dish TV had dropped its service charges by 50 per cent to Rs 3,990 inclusive of one year subscription.
The company’s new offering will run for 45 days till 15 November, Sunil Khanna, CEO of New Era Entertainment Network Limited (NEENL), which manages Dish TV, said.
Under this scheme, new customers can redeem the gift vouchers at 46 select holiday destinations in India or choose amongst four foreign destinations that include Singapore and Bangkok.
Under the scheme, a two-night and three-day stay at any hotel with which Dish TV has a tie-up is what is on offer.
Khanna said the company will conduct lucky draws for Diwali in early November for the first prize (an Elantra car), second prize (10 Santro cars), third prize (100 Honda motorbikes) and the fourth prize (500 Samsung mobile phones).
Khanna adds, “We are looking at targeting 300,000 subscribers during this period.” At present, Dish TV has a subscriber base of 450,000 and aims to touch the one million mark by the end of this financial year ending 31 March 2006.
Additionally, Dish TV is planning to unveil value added services like movies on demand and personal video recorder (PVR) between October and November. The movie on demand service will come at a price of Rs 40 per film.
The PVR hardware, which would cost Rs 16,000, will enable time-shifted viewing through a separate set-top box enabling subscribers to watch what they want, when they want.
Dish TV will be marketing the scheme employing various media like press, television and outdoor.
Apart from Dish TV, the other DTH service in the country, which is subscription free and run by pubcaster Doordarshan, is branded DD Direct Plus.
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.
