DTH
DTH growth prospects in Europe limited: report
MUMBAI: While in India Zee’s Direct To Home (DTH) platform Dish TV is adding customers everyday in Europe where the market is well developed the situation is different.
DTH growth is expected to be limited. This is partly because many European countries appear to have reached saturation point and also because competition will be fierce with nascent free-to-air Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT) services.
Research organisation Research and Markets has come out with a report Digital Terrestrial TV: Prospects in the Enlarged European Union (EU).
Italy is expected to be the largest single DTT market in Europe by 2009, with nearly 13 million DTT households, followed by the UK and Germany.
The report reveals that the UK will remain the EU country with the highest overall level of digitalisation. However its forecast digitalisation rate by 2009 (86 per cent) will be some way short of the British government’s target for analogue switch-off (95 per cent).
Other countries expected strong digital growth over the period are Finland (85 per cent), Italy (83 per cent) and Spain (77 per cent). By contrast, Greece is expected to have digital penetration of less than 10 per cent by 2009.
The report went on to note that digitalisation of Europe’s cable networks will continue to be hindered by the high price differentials between analogue and digital subscriptions.
The report stated that DTT services had been introduced in seven EU countries by the end of last year. Meanwhile, Germany has become the first country in Europe to completely phase out analogue terrestrial services in a number of areas.
The most popular and thus far, in terms of subscriber growth most successful DTT product has utilised the free-to-air (FTA) model. The UK and more recently Finland and Italy have all experienced rapid growth in take-up. Around one million UK households switching to DTT in the fourth quarter of 2003 alone.
By contrast, DTT models incorporating pay TV have generally struggled. The most notable is ITV Digital in the UK. This is has been due to competition from other pay TV providers in their market. Indeed, the failure of ITV Digital has led to other European countries revising their plans. An increasing number seem set to base their plans around a substantial core of FTA services.
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.
