DTH
DishTV looks forward to better Q4 2025
MUMBAI: The good news for DTH major Dish TV India is that it maintained its EBITDA margin at 32.9 per cent in Q3FY25. This despite, the drop in the topline, in EBITDA, subscription revenues, number of subscribers, and an increase in losses.
The other piece of good news is that the company is optimistic of things turning around the coming quarter thanks to finance minister lifting the taxable income levels for the general Indian public. .
Dish TV India CEO & executive director Manoj Dobhal said that Dish TV is venturing into B2B e-commerce through its newly incorporated subsidiary, Dish Bharat Ventures Pvt Ltd, established in October 2024.
“As an organisation, Dish TV India has come a long way and has, in this eventful journey, positively touched the lives of millions of stakeholders be it our ever valued past or present subscribers, shareholders, trade partners, suppliers or employees. We are indebted to all of them and would like to assure all our stakeholders that we would continue to do our best to make the business scale new heights all over again,” he said.” The company remains committed to a turnaround and believes that the convergence of digital content with linear television will help television maintain its mass appeal as it continues to provide value-for-money offerings to its subscribers.”
Preparing a content pipeline that adds a flavor of uniqueness and differentiates the OTT aggregation app of Dish TV India from similar products, the company conceived and launched the ‘Watcho Storytellers Conclave’ in Kolkata during the quarter. The trademark event aimed to foster creativity and innovation in content creation within the regional entertainment space while providing a platform for emerging storytellers to showcase their talent. More than three hundred established as well as budding content related professionals participated in the daylong event sharing their vision about the changing content ecosystem. More such ‘Watcho Storytellers Conclave’ are in the pipeline in the coming quarters and should give Dish TV India access to a unique and creative talent pool of content.
Doubling down on its content innovation strategy and to expand monetization opportunities, Dish TV India during the third quarter of the current fiscal partnered with C21 Media to launch Content India 2025. The collaboration is aimed at positioning India as a global leader in content creation.
The upcoming Content India 2025 would bring together industry leaders to discuss trends, challenges and opportunities in the media landscape helping support the growth of Indian content and its distribution across international platforms.
To combat pressure from online streaming platforms, Dish TV has also enhanced its offering by bundling complimentary access to six over-the-top (OTT) apps with DTH subscriptions. The company’s OTT aggregation app ‘Watcho’ has crossed 7.6 million paid subscriptions, with its premium plan ‘Watcho Max’ now featuring 18 popular OTT apps.
On the financial front, Dish reported a net loss of Rs 465 million for the quarter ended 31 December 2024, compared to a loss of Rs 28 million in the corresponding quarter last fiscal. The direct-to-home operator’s operating revenues declined by 20.7 per cent year-on-year to Rs 3,730 million.
Subscription revenues saw a sharp decline of 33.5 per cent to Rs 2,472 million, while EBITDA fell by 31.9 per cent to Rs 1,227 million compared to the same quarter last year.
The company attributed the continued revenue pressure to increasing online content consumption and weak consumer discretionary spending, with cost-conscious viewers shifting towards the free DTH platform.
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.
