DTH
Sify capitalises on TV’s talent hunt craze as auditions go online
MUMBAI: Aspiring contestants waiting for endless hours in maddeningly long queues, organisers struggling to cope with the logistics pressure and complications – all kinds of chaos break loose when television channels conduct their national auditions for talent hunt shows.
Sify Limited has spotted a good revenue opportunity here and is offering to make the whole process much simpler with the use of its national Iway network.
The company has already associated with national networks such as Star India and Zee to offer them online solutions for the audition process. For example, Zee TV has associated with Sifymax for the video auditions of its upcoming talent hunt show Cinestars. The auditions will be held in 154 cities across India using the technology edge of Sify’s 3400 plus iWay cyber cafes.
Similarly, Star India’s Vijay TV conducted video auditions for its comic hunt Kalakka Povadu Yaaru 2 (KPY 2) through Sify Iways in June.
“Sify is ideally positioned with the Sify Iway network (over 3000 Iways across 154 cities) and the broadband portal, SifyMax.com, to manage massive customer video interaction activity like the Zee CineStar activity. The customer can take the tutorial on SifyMax and the auditions can be recorded at the Iways or uploaded online on SifyMax.com. The customer is charged for these services,” explains Sify Ltd Portals president V Sivaramakrishnan.
Zee TV marketing head Tarun Mehra agrees, “Zee Cinestars is an all India contest and understandably the auditions demand a lot of hard work. But, with the help of Sifymax, we have simplified the whole process. The technology lessens the load and this helps us to channelise our resources to the other areas of the project.”
Sify will be soon exploring the facility for an in-house talent hunt, the Net Jockey Hunt. The contest will be conducted at popular Malls in Mumbai for its city specific broad band portal www.mumbailive.in.
Speaking on the strategy, Sivaramakrishnan offers, “Without any registration /subscription fee, we reach out and offer value added services (entertainment and information content in video format) to this segment. Almost 34 per cent of the Sifymax users access the internet via cyber cafe, through the Sify Iway cyber café chain. Hence we are leveraging on this huge strength.”
On the revenue front, Sify is expected to push this revenue model to deliver this fiscal. However, Sivaramakrishnan refuses to divulge the target. “It is early days to comment on this,” he says.
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.
