DTH
Tata Sky to reply to MIB’s showcause notice
MUMBAI: A month after the ministry of information and broadcasting (MIB) came out with its mandate that 24 Doordarshan channels have to be carried on all DTH platforms; the ministry has cracked the whip on three DTH players in the country for not obeying the notification. Showcause notices have reportedly been sent to Reliance Digital TV, Sun Direct and Tata Sky as to why action shouldn’t be taken against them for not complying with this requirement.
Now, one of the big players is all set to give a fitting reply to the ministry – Tata Sky, which has unsuccessfully been chasing the MIB for transponders on ISRO’s GSAT-10 satellite. “Our licence with Doordarshan was to carry eight channels but we were carrying 15 since our customers wanted them. We have been running pillar to post to get capacity but no one has been helping us,” says and agitated Tata Sky CEO Harit Nagpal.
The DTH operator has signed long term contracts with all its channels and has no more capacity left for any more channels. “I am ready to carry the 24 channels that the government says I should but I need time to figure out how to do it. Capacity creation takes time. There are only two ways to create capacity- either get more transponders or remove channels. If I remove channels, customers may not be too happy with it,” adds Nagpal. “And also my contracts with other broadcasters for carriage of their channels have to be kept in mind.”
The notice was sent to Tata Sky yesterday and it has a deadline of 15 days to submit its reply. However, going by the looks of it, it won’t be too long before the ministry gets Nagpal’s reply. “We had written even when the notification was passed requesting them to reconsider since we could not do it since it had failed to help us get capacity. We got no response from the MIB for that letter,” he reveals.
According to the rule, all DTH operators have to provide 24 DD channels irrespective of whether they provide them a-la-carte or in packages to their subscribers.
The channels which cable operators must show are DD National, DD News, DD Bharati, DD Urdu, DD Sports, DD India, DD Kashir, DD Punjabi, DD Girnar, DD Sahyadri, DD Saptagiri, DD Malayalam, DD Podhigai, DD Chandana, DD Bangla, DD North East, DD Bihar, DD Uttar Pradesh, DD Rajasthan, DD Madhya Pradesh, DD Oriya, Gyan Darshan, Lok Sabha TV and Rajya Sabha TV.
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.
