DTH
Swaraj swings towards private broadcasters on DTH?
Is information and broadcasting minister Sushma Swaraj listening to the pleas of wannabe players that the country should not take the open architecture route on the DTH television front? (All broadcasters have been unanimous that this would make DTH a non-starter.) If one goes by statements being attributed to her, it appears as though she is, though she might well be playing to the gallery in order to keep the groaners at bay.
A local business daily has her reportedly telling reporters that that there was no technology which allowed a set-top box to access any number of DTH services. “At most, two DTH services can be accessed,” she had said.
Swaraj, reportedly, made these statements after being taken on a tour of the News Corp owned UK DTH service BSKyB’s facilities in England. Swaraj had paid a visit to Cannes to promote Indian cinema as leader of an official delegation to the film festival there. She reportedly had a stopover in Britain.
If the statements being attributed to her are true and they do get translated into changes in what are being seen as draconian DTH regulations, some private broadcasters may go ahead with their DTH plans which are in cold storage now. Among them: Zee TV, Star, Sterling Group, and Modi Entertainment.
A senior industry official, however, was not very optimistic about the statements from Ms Swaraj. He pointed out that no private broadcaster has submitted a DTH proposal to the government till date.
And secondly, he added that DTH has currently been relegated to the backburner by both private broadcasters and the government. “The convergence bill (it is likely to be tabled in parliament during the monsoon session) is what the focus is on currently. Circa 2002 is when we will see any action on DTH. And the only serious player I see is VSNL. Being a telecom company and government owned, it is not impacted by the restrictions laid down for broadcasters in the DTH regulations..”
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.
