DTH
Dishtv announces special pricing for Cas
MUMBAI: With conditional access (Cas) coming in shortly in Dehli, Mumbai, Kolkatta, the war is on for the consumer. Direct-to-home (DTH) service provider Dishtv has announced pricing offers for the Cas cities.
Dishtv has worked on a 2 pronged pricing strategy – both for the hardware as well as for the monthly subscriptions.
For a dishtv connection, there is now an entry option and an overall value proposition.
The new pricing options are as follows:
Down Payment Offer: To deliver better value to its consumers, the existing scheme has been enhanced for all new incumbent subscribers in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata
On the payment of monthly subscription of one month of any of the two packages, the consumer can enjoy six months viewing. This is applicable on the acquisition of hardware at Rs 2950 along with Rs 200 as installation charges.
Easy Pay Offer: In order to enable an easy ‘getting started’, Dishtv offers the following scheme for Cas notified areas in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata.
A pay out of Rs 1300 (to take the entire equipment home, on right to use basis) + Rs 200 as installation charges. Thereafter, a monthly rental of Rs 35 for the hardware will apply for a period of five years. This will be charged along with the monthly subscription of any of the two packages that the consumer subscribes to.
Multi TV households can now get started with dishtv at a special price. For instance, for four TVs in a typical south city home, one now needs to foot a bill of only Rs 6000 to get four dishtv connections. Further, the monthly subscriptions on the second, third and fourth connections would cost only Rs 100 + taxes each month.
In addition its monthly subscription packages are also two tiered – one with 85 channels at Rs 210 +taxes per month and the other enhanced package with 125 channels at 240 + taxes per month, keeping in view the entertainment needs of varied users.
Clearly, DTH service providers are taking the fight to the multi-system operators (MSOs). Tata Sky recently announced it would offer free subscription for six months to consumers who fall in the Cas area.
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.
