DTH
Q1-17: Airtel DTH revenue up 22.2 percent
BENGALURU: DAS phase III has been a boost for the carriage industry in subscriber additions, revenues, and operating profits. Buoyed by the government’s decision to stick to deadlines for digitisation, the DTH industry in India is continuing its bloom run, if one were to go by the results reported by Bharti Airtel Limited about its Digital TV services (Airtel DTH) for the quarter and year ended 30 March 2016 (Q1-17, current quarter.
Revenue from Airtel’s DTH segment in Q1-17 increased 22.2 per cent to Rs 836.9 crore as compared to Rs 684.8 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous year.
Airtel’s DTH segment reported EBIT (Earnings before interest and tax) of Rs 121.9 crore (14.6 per cent operating margin) as compared to EBIT of Rs 41.5 crore (6.1 percent operating margin) in Q1-16..
Subscription numbers
Airtel DTH added 4.24 lakh net subscribers in Q1-17 to bring its subscriber base to 121.9 lakh rom 117.25 lakh in the previous quarter. Average revenue per user (ARPU) increased to Rs 233 from Rs 229 in the immediate trailing quarter. Airtel DTH reported a monthly subscriber churn of 0.8 percent in Q1-17, same as the churn in Q1-16 and Q4-16.
Capex
Airtel increased capex for its DTH segment for Q1-17 by Rs 203 crore as compared to the Rs 211.3 during the corresponding quarter of the previous year. The company’s cumulative investments into Airtel DTH increased 19.1 per cent to Rs 6,693.6 crore in the current quarter as compared to Rs 5,621.6 crore in Q1-16.
Bharti Airtel Limited numbers
Airtel DTH contributes just about 4 per cent to Bharti Airtel’s Limited. Bharti Airtel reported total revenue of Rs 25,546.5 crore in Q1-17, 7.9 per cent more than the Rs 23.671 crore in Q1-16..
After accounting for exceptional items (net gains of Rs 82 crore), the consolidated net income for the current quarter stands at Rs 1,462 crore compared to Rs 2,113 crore in corresponding quarter of last year. Q1-16 net Income of Rs 2,113 crore has been re-instated to Ind-AS from previously reported IFRS figures which includes an exceptional gain of Rs 556 crore on account of this reinstatement.
Note: The unit of currency in this report is the Indian rupee – Rs (also conventionally represented by INR). The Indian numbering system or the Vedic numbering system has been used to denote money values. The basic conversion to the international norm would be:
(a) 100,00,000 = 100 lakh = 10,000,000 = 10 million = 1 crore.
(b) 10,000 lakh = 100 crore = 1 arab = 1 billion.
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.
