DTH
Hathway to launch digital cable in Pune, Bangalore
MUMBAI: Hathway Cable & Datacom is scaling up its digital cable television services. The Rajan Raheja promoted multi system operator (MSO) is expanding its services to two new cities within a month, after rolling it out in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi.
Hathway will launch digital cable TV in Pune on 20 May through an underground fibre linkup from Mumbai. The Motorola DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexers) technology will enable digital television channels to be carried with Internet Protocol (IP) interface.
Digital cable TV will also be made available in Bangalore on 15 June. “We have the digital headends in place. For our expansion to other new cities, we only need to have the fibre links,” says Hathway Cable & Datacom chief executive officer K Jayaraman.
Hathway plans to expand to Punjab, Hyderabad and Nashik in the second phase for which it will use the Motorola DWDM technology as the transport carrier solution. While the digital headend in Delhi will cater to the northern market expansion, the southern language states will be serviced from Bangalore and the western region from Mumbai. “We will be linking up through fibre from the centralised centres of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore which will act as hubs,” says Jayaraman.
The DWDM technology will also enable Hathway to carry data and voice, whenever it is ready to offer these services. “We clearly realise that digital is the way forward. We have already invested Rs 1 billion towards this and have the set-top boxes (STBs) with us. The expansion to the cities requires minor additional investments towards fibre links and transport equipment,” says Jayaraman.
Although Hathway has been trying to actively push its digital STBs, the offtake has been agonisingly slow. But Jayaraman is hopeful that it would catch on. “After our digital launch in the two new cities, our target is to move 5,000 STBs a month. We are currently selling 1,000 boxes a month,” he says.
Hathway offers 115 television channels for its digital subscribers who can buy the boxes outright at around Rs 4,000. Two installment schemes are also available (Rs 2,000 upfront with four equal payments of Rs 550, and an upfront of Rs 999 with 12 payments of Rs 275). “We will be upping our offering to 140 channels by 15 June. The monthly cable TV subscription fee is the same for both the analogue and digital services,” says Jayaraman.
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.
