DTH
Tata Sky launches new service Tata Sky Romance
Mumbai: Tata Sky has announced the launch of its latest platform service Tata Sky Romance to offer curated romantic content across Hollywood (dubbed in Hindi), Bollywood, and television to its subscribers. Priced at Rs two per day, the service is completely ad-free and is available for on-the-go viewing on Tata Sky mobile app.
The DTH player has roped in Shaheer Sheikh and Sana Makbulhave to promote the new offering with a quirky campaign.
Tata Sky Romance has a lineup of Hollywood blockbusters “Bold & Beautiful,” “Cedar Cove,” “Ashk,” “Notting Hill,” “No Strings Attached,” “I Could Never Be Your Woman,” “Death Defying Acts,” “Heartbreakers,” “The Good Girl,” and popular Bollywood titles like “Jab We Met” amongst others.
Going ahead, shows such as “A Place To Call Home” and “Juda Na Hona” will also be added to the service along with more film titles, said the DTH brand in a statement.
“Romance is one of the most popular genres in India when it comes to entertainment. We believe Tata Sky Romance is a good destination for audiences preferring to watch content from a different country but in their own language,” said Tata Sky chief commercial and content officer Pallavi Puri. “The service provides the choicest selection of romantic titles across Hollywood and Bollywood on TV screen in Hindi, ad-free, making it a perfect gateway to unwind, this festive season.”
“We at JOP Network are elated to associate with Tata Sky to bring to the audiences a special curation of romantic movies, shows and more from Hollywood and Bollywood that are sure to entertain the romantic chords of every viewer. These titles have been specially curated keeping in mind consumer likings, popularity and ratings of the shows and movies over the years. This first-of-its-kind service is sure to rekindle the heart,” added JOP Network director Urvi Agarwal.
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.
