DTH
Tata Sky celebrates 14th anniversary, creates a nostalgic digital campaign
KOLKATA: 8 August marked the fourteenth anniversary of Tata Sky, a brand that has grown into a successful and innovation-led organization with a deep-rooted commitment to customer satisfaction through hard work and living up to its ideals of delivering value through strategic planning, technical innovation and embodying passion for all their endeavors.
To commemorate the fourteenth-anniversary milestone, Tata Sky, India’s leading content distribution and Pay TV platform in collaboration with Chimp&z Inc, created a nostalgic #14YearsOfJingalala digital campaign honoring the allegiance of 14 of its patrons who have been the earliest customers of Tata Sky.
The outreach involved touching base with some of the loyal customers spread across the country and requesting them to share their thoughts on being associated with the brand for more than a decade. Their unscripted anecdotes and memories thus garnered advocated the evolution of the brand over the last 14 years and were weaved into a nostalgic video that enunciated trust and quality. The campaign was further amplified with celebrity influencers congratulating Tata Sky for a successful and formidable journey.
Commenting on honoring this landmark anniversary, Tata Sky chief communication officer Anurag Kumar said, “Our history of putting the customer first is evident through our network of long-term customers, many of which have been with us for over ten years. This anniversary, we wanted to relive the connections we have forged with our consumers through genuine and authentic testimonials that gave an overview of their journey with us. The responses received not only makes for a joyful and encouraging video but also makes us take comfort in the fact that we have made a positive difference to their lives and earned their loyalty for life.”
On the success of the campaign, Chimp&z Inc CEO and co-founder Angad Singh Manchanda said, “We went by the thought that a significant milestone like the 14th anniversary of Tata Sky needed to be upheld with a campaign that brought out the real essence of the brand. And what better way to do that than to reach out to those people who have experienced the service and quality of the product first hand. The #14YearsOfJingalala campaign video is like beautiful memorabilia to be cherished. The people featured in the video are not only consumers but brand custodians and have been endorsing the brand in their own little way.”
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.
