DTH
Oscar.com to unleash content ahead of the Academy awards
MUMBAI: With the prestigious Oscar Awards a few weeks away, Oscar.com, the official site for the 79th Academy Awards, will provide movie fans with a lot of video.
This includes behind-the-scenes content, a sneak peek into Oscar preparations, as well as online sweepstakes and interactive games. In india the oscars will air on Star movies on 26 February.
During Oscar Week, 19-24 February 2007 Oscar.com will feature behind-the-scenes video diaries from the host Ellen DeGeneres as she prepares to host the telecast.
Hosted by Allyson Waterman and Greg Vaughan (star of US broadcaster ABC’s General Hospital), Road to the Oscars will cover the events that take place during the weeks leading up to the Academy Awards, including footage from pre-Oscar events, interviews and post-show coverage. Road to the Oscars will feature four weekly shows and a daily show from 19 -26 February 2007.
New to Oscar.com this year is a Q&A section with the nominees in which they answer questions. Fans can get to know the stars better. Also new is the Thank You Cam, where fans can see the first exclusive comments from the winners as they leave the stage with their Oscar statuette.
Tom Julian, Oscar.coms official fashion trend analyst, will give fans a look into red carpet style with exclusive one-on-one visits with fashion designers. Julian will also take fans back in time with the Evolution of Style page.
In addition Oscar.com will launch two exclusive promotions, Find the 79s and Predict the Winners. A watch-and-win contest, viewers can tune in during the live show to look for hidden 79s placed throughout the telecast. At the end of the telecast, viewers may log on to Oscar.com and submit a list of where the symbols appeared for a chance to win great prizes. Predict the Winners offers fans a chance to test their skills on their Oscar predictions. On Oscar.com fans may follow along with printable ballots.
Users can also log on on 26 February 2007 to watch backstage interview footage with the winners of the 79th Academy Awards.
Furthermore Oscar.com also has interactive games, including Your Perfect Oscar Date. This allows players to determine which celebrities would make their perfect Oscar night date. Which Character Are You? aims to keep players guessing about which memorable movie character they are most similar to.
The challenge for the Academy though will be viewership. Apart from The Departed which made over $100 million the other four films nominated for best picture have not made much money at the box office. Their combined box office take is only slightly more than what last year’s nominees had made which was the lowest ever.
In fact Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima a second world war film told from Japan’s perspective has made only a little over two million dollars. The Queen which stars Oscar favourite Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II made a modest $35 million. Babel made a little over $ 23 million.
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.
