DTH
Tata Sky launches new value-added service Tata Sky Hits
MUMBAI: Tata Sky, leading content distribution and Pay TV platform, has launched its new value-added service Tata Sky Hits. Featuring a selection of some of the most popular, iconic and award-winning Hollywood television content from the 80s and 90s, Tata Sky Hits is all set to invoke nostalgia with this distinctive curation.
Encompassing all genres of content including drama, comedy, crime, action and romance, some of the key titles exclusively available on the service include: Baywatch, Charlie’s Angels, Charmed, Miami Vice, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Three’s Company, Murder, She Wrote, Knight Rider, Sabrina The Teenage Witch, The Lucy Show, Family Ties, Diff’rent Strokes and many more. The never-seen-before HD service will feature the choicest of hit TV series from Hollywood and international majors such as NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Sony Pictures, Fremantle, ITV Studios and others.
Tata Sky chief commercial and content officer Pallavi Puri said: “At Tata Sky we are always looking at serving the discerning content needs of our subscribers. With Tata Sky Hits we are giving our subscribers an exclusive platform to indulge in their favourite Hollywood shows from the 80s and 90s. The diverse assortment of English shows from the good old days that Hits has curated is exceptional and fulfils a need gap for our evolving viewers who are constantly looking for unique entertainment destinations that are not available elsewhere be it TV or OTT.”
“I am very excited with the launch of our service on Tata Sky. This is a major milestone for Rewind Networks,” said Rewind Networks CEO Avi Himatsinghani. “We are confident that the great success of HITS in Asia will be replicated in India, with the service’s solid curation of the best Hollywood TV series from previous decades. Viewers of Tata Sky Hits are going to love some of the best international shows and storytelling that they grew up on – in HD for the first time”
Through Tata Sky Hits, subscribers can now relive the iconic & memorable characters from yesteryear shows starring Pamela Anderson, David Hasselhoff, Don Johnson, Michael J. Fox, Lucille Ball, Mariska Hargitay, Angela Lansbury, Shannen Doherty, Farrah Fawcett, Melissa Joan Hart, Gary Coleman and many others on Television as well as on-the-go on the Tata Sky Mobile App under Live TV and catch-up. Tata Sky Hits is now available to all subscribers at a nominal cost of Rs 75 per month.
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.
