DTH
Reliance Digital TV joins hands with Visiware to power iGames service
NEW DELHI: Reliance Digital TV has partnered with Visiware to power iGames service on its DTH platform.
Reliance Digital TV’s customers will have access to a richer and improved gaming experience with twice the number of games for the same price. Accessible through the Interactive button on the remote control, the iGames service does not require any additional equipment.
The portal offers a selection of 16 games split up in four genres primarily for people between 8 – 25 years old to enjoy. Each category proposes four different games selected out of a 300-game catalogue. The portal is updated with two games getting refreshed every month.
The games include Adventure with arcade and action titles with hundreds of levels to conquer, Board & Cards with classics such as Solitaire and Freecell; Brain Teasers with mind boggling thinking references; and Sports with games like Football and Basketball amongst others.
Reliance Digital TV’s customers can subscribe through phone or SMS to one of the two available offers. They can either select the monthly option at Rs 34 a month or the quarterly option at Rs101 for three months with the fourth month free.
iGames’s revamp and enhancement bring new additional features. The portal is updated every month with two new games replacing old ones without any fee necessary for both the monthly and the quarterly subscribers.
Reliance Digital TV business head Ashutosh M Srivastava said, “We are glad to partner with Visiware and confident of introducing a completely new breed of TV gaming on iGames platform. The advantage with Reliance Digital TV gaming service is that it is easily accessible, affordable and can be enjoyed by every member of the family with no age bar. This opens up a large market, not only in the larger cities, but also in the Tier II-Tier III cities and small towns.”
“With this new launch, in partnership with a major DTH network such as Reliance Digital TV, we take another defining step into the Indian market. We are really delighted that our games will bring real interactivity to the Indian television market and for Visiware and Reliance Digital TV this is the perfect team in order to propose a really good and innovative interactive TV offer. The size of the distribution is critical in this market and we are very proud to be partners of all the top operators across Europe, America and Asia,” added Visiware CEO Colas Overkott.
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.
