DTH
Tata Sky aims to drive up ARPU with international content
MUMBAI: Direct-to-home (DTH) service Tata Sky has launched its newest offering, Tata Sky World Screen—a handpicked bouquet of international entertainment content available from 16 March 2018.
Tata Sky World Screen will feature prime content from across geographies and multiple languages (Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Belgium, Israel, Cuba, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Swahili, Japanese, Chinese and Korean). Non-English content will have subtitles and some will also be dubbed in English. The ad-free service will allow subscribers to view select series and movies from across the world round the clock.
“Content like this is not just interesting to tier 1 and 2 cities but also to tier 3 and 4. People are willing to pay if they get the right product. The way we distribute our content has a greater chance of reaching hinterlands as well. Digital is more relevant in promoting this content than any other product,” said Tata Sky chief content officer Arun Unni.
“We focus on both ARPU (average revenue per user) as well as increasing the subscriber base. The average industry ARPU is Rs 270-300, our ARPU is a bit higher than the industry figure,” he added.
Priced at Rs 75 a month, the content will be available to subscribers on their TV sets through the set top box, mobile app and the web app of Tata Sky.
“Our analysis indicates that consumption patterns are evolving, and there is an audience looking for exciting and diverse content, unconstrained by language. The objective here is to give consumers the content that is not easy to discover and consume. Our handpicked list includes some of the most popular and critically acclaimed movies and TV shows across the world, a lot of which has never been seen on TV before in India,” added Unni.
Amongst the TV series premieres will be the acclaimed thriller Wallander, Happy Valley, Code 37, Team Chocolate, Prisoners of War and Babylon Berlin. There will also be two movie premieres a month from world cinema.
In another partnership, India’s premier youth entertainment portal 101India.com partnered with Toronto based media giant QYOU Media for its newly launched service on Tata Sky, The Q India. The localised service will showcase premium digital content curated from popular content creators and broadcast it on TV.
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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.
