DTH
Dish TV waives off 30-day lock-in period for pay channels, channel bouquets
MUMBIA: India’s biggest direct-to-home operator Dish TV has waived off the 30-day lock-in period for pay channels and select channel bouquets it had levied earlier.
This lock-in period, which was earlier introduced by the DTH operator, prevented consumers from unsubscribing to a channel they had opted for until the duration of the lock-in period.
Consumers can now drop and opt for channels without these restrictions.
According to some subscribers, however, there is no change made to the seven-day lock-in period for sports channels.
Dish TV is by far the largest DTH player in the country and probably the second largest globally. As on 31 December 2018, Dish TV claimed a net active subscriber base of 236 lakh (23.6 million, 2.36 crore).
Two major DTH players – Airtel Direct TV (Airtel DTH) and the merged Dish TV Videocon d2h entity (Dish TV) have about 55 percent of the market share of private DTH subscribers in the country. During CY 2018, these two players added 17.06 lakh (1.706 million, 0.1706 crore) subscribers, or 58.2 percent of the net subscribers that were added by all the 5 private DTH players in the country. Airtel DTH added 10.63 lakh (1.063 million, 0.1063 crore) net subscribers, while Dish TV added 6.43 lakh (0.643 million, 0.0643 crore) during the period under review.
Earlier in the week a report by CNBC-TV18 claimed that Singapore Telecommunications Ltd (Singtel) and Bharti Airtel are jointly looking to buy a stake in Dish TV in a bid to compete with Reliance Jio.
The duo is looking to acquire the promoter’s 60 per cent stake in Dish TV for around Rs 6150 crore. As part of Bharti Airtel’s plan to raise $4.6 billion, Singtel is likely to buy stock in it worth $525 million through shares and bonds.
GIC, the parent company of Singtel via Temasek Holdings, also owns about 20 per cent in Tata Sky and could hint at a future possibility of further consolidation in the DTH sector.
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.
