DTH
Now, BPCL wants to come direct to home
NEW DELHI: Petroleum major Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL) plans to foray into providing direct-to-home (DTH) TV, or content delivery to subscriber’s home using satellite, reports Press Trust of India.
India’s third largest oil firm plans to use its 1800 LPG distributors, covering about 20 million consumers, for marketing of DTH and is targeting 30 per cent of the over eight million DTH consumers expected by 2010, the news report quoted a BPCL official as saying.
To provide digital content distribution service to subscribers at a very affordable price, BPCL may form a joint venture with a partner dealing either in cost intensive areas like content, transponder space and STB or a financer.
BPCL has acquired in-house expertise in satellite up linking and optimization of precious space segment in satellite. It has acquired experience in hub implementation at integrated data center at Greater Noida for connecting 300 offices and 3,000 users all over the country, the PTI report stated.
With revenue sharing between cable operators and broadcasters at 83 per cent and 17 per cent, BPCL hopes to rope in broadcasting community as there is a huge revenue loss to them.
Distribution of content being major bottleneck for the broadcaster, any organization which has the capability of doing it effectively and also managing the customer segment – customer acquisition, equipment logistics, first-level call handling and monthly collection of subscription – can play a major role in filling the gap.
“BPCL’s advantage of being a ‘neutral service provider’ will encourage content players to willingly share their contents with BPCL at market determined prices,” PTI quotes a company proposal, which envisages taking on a joint venture partner.
At the moment, while there are two DTH players — Dish TV and Doordarshan Direct+ — in the country, BPCL will be the sixth player to enter the arena. The other three DTH services are being planned by a Tata-Star joint venture, Sun TV and the Anil Ambani-promoted Reliance Skymagic.
Incidentally, News Corp has objected to Ambani using the `Sky’ brand name.
If all the players actually get their services on air, India would be the only country in the world that would have bucked the global DTH trend of having one or two players per country.
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.
