DTH
DishTV partners with ICICI for digital payments
MUMBAI: DishTV has tied up with ICICI Bank by consolidated assets, to make payments and recharges easier. The association enables subscribers of the DTH platform to recharge their connections on any Unified Payment Interface (UPI) enabled app and through *99#, a National Unified USSD Platform (NUUP) in a hassle free and cashless manner.
Dish TV India CEO Arun Kapoor said, “This is another customer oriented initiative in the DTH industry to recharge through UPI transactions. This alliance with ICICI Bank through UPI will drive higher customer adoption and allow them to be a part of the digital economy. This will also aid our vastly spread customers with or without internet access to recharge conveniently. The nation is becoming cashless, so are our DishTV subscribers.”
With an aim to increase digital transactions, DishTV will be rolling out special offers for its customers. DishTV subscribers can benefit from 50 per cent cashback (up to Rs.100) on their first UPI merchant transaction from ICICI Bank’s iMobile or Pockets app.
ICICI Bank senior general manager and head digital channels Abonty Banerjee added, “ICICI Bank has played a key role in conceptualizing the UPI initiative along with NPCI to bring in interoperability among banks for ease in payments. We are happy to be associated with Dish TV to launch a unique solution that enables customers to renew their subscriptions simply from ICICI Bank’s iMobile, Pockets and other UPI enabled apps like BHIM among others. I am confident that Dish TV consumers will widely use the solution.”
A DishTV subscriber can make a payment to UPI ID which is specific for each subscriber in the format. Payments can also be made without using internet through NUUP. Customers have to just dial *99# from their mobile number registered with their respective bank accounts, select the option ‘send money’ and enter the UPI ID as the payment address for making the payment.
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.
