DTH
HFCL plans to invest Rs 6 billion in 2 years, IPTV in pipeline
MUMBAI: HFCL Infotel Ltd.(HITL), a private telephony operator in Punjab, is planning to invest Rs 6 billion over the next two years for offering a convergence of services including digital cable and IPTV.
The company has already installed an analogue headend at Jalandhar and is making its feed available to local cable operators. By appointing these operators as franchisees, it is able to bundle its telephony and broadband services.
“We are planning to also run a pilot for digital cable and IPTV in four-eight weeks. We intend to invest Rs 6 billion for the convergence project in two years,” HFCL Infotel CEO Surendra Lunia tells Indiantelevision.com.
While the company has installed a Scientific Atlanta headend for analogue services, the digital headend is from Harmonic. Iredeto will provide the encryption system.
“We are in talks with various vendors for IPTV. SeaChange, for example, can provide video-on-demand servers and the middle ware. We want to do the systems integration ourselves. We are already streaming IP in Mohali as a pilot with local soultions,” says Lunia.
On the content front, HFCL has already signed with Star India for providing its bouquet of channels to cable networks. “We also have an understanding with Star for digital and IPTV, though we haven’t formally signed yet. We are in negotiations with Sony as well,” says Lunia.
Cable operators have to pay Rs 50,000 to be franchisees and are given a 20 per cent share on revenues from a stream which comprises telephony and broadband. If these franchisee operators invest in the twisted copper line, they will become owners of the network. But there is another scheme where operators needn’t invest on the copper line; in such cases, the ownership is with HFCL.
HFCL Infotel has a subsidiary company, Connect Broadband Services Ltd, which handles content and headend operations. The networking is done through HFCL Infotel.
With just 40,000 fixed line telephone connections in residential areas, HFCL plans to expand this base by offering cable TV services. “We have a total base of 200,000 fixed line connections, 20 per cent of which are from residential users. We see this bundled offering as a way to increase penetration. Besides, it will allow us to increase our revenue streams from our users,” says Lunia.
The company offers a convergence bill for telephony, cable TV and broadband. Customers have to pay a monthly fee of Rs 699 where they get cable TV, 500 mb of data download at 512 kbps, and 100 telephone calls free.
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.
