DTH
Vserv to offer solutions to telcos & DTH operators
MUMBAI: Smart data platform for mobile marketing in India and Southeast Asia – Vserv has forayed into the burgeoning commerce space.
In an industry-first move, Vserv will now provide an end-to-end solution for telcos and DTH operators, right from the discovery of customers to the transaction of services. This step will empower consumer-facing companies to utilize the combined power of Vserv Smart Data platform and commerce solution.
With this added capability, Vserv will enable telcos to promote segmented offers across data and voice. By driving these transactions, Vserv enhances average revenue per user (ARPU) for telcos. For DTH operators, this translates into selling segmented channel packs leading to a major jump in subscriptions and higher revenue.
Vserv co-founder and CEO Dippak Khurana said, “We saw the opportunity to redefine the relevance, simplicity and convenience of these services for the customer. Vserv’s massive reach of 120 million unique users in India combined with this commerce solution creates a disruptive development in the mobile Internet ecosystem. While our Smart Data platform is a revolutionary offering for mobile marketing, with our commerce solution, we now complete a user’s journey from intent to purchase. This unique proposition provides a powerful opportunity for consumer-facing companies, which are seeking to tap into the growing mobile Internet user base. We have always challenged the status quo and this offering is a gigantic leap towards bringing about a radical shift in the ecosystem.”
The Vserv commerce solution delivering relevance, simplicity and convenience works on a four- pronged approach of: discovery (identifying the right user with Vserv Smart Data), promotion (engaging the user with segmented offers), payment (enabling seamless transaction for the user) and activation (quick and easy activation of the service).
The total revenue of telco and DTH services in India stood at around $31 billion in 2014, and is currently growing at a rate of 10 per cent per annum. Within this, the share of digital commerce is close to 10 per cent and is expected to grow by 300 per cent in the next four years. This growth will be fuelled by the rapidly expanding Internet user base, which is expected to reach 500 million users by 2018, 80 per cent of which will be contributed by mobile users. With the largest mobile Internet user base in India and its unique proposition of enabling commerce for consumer-facing companies, Vserv is strategically positioned to capture a sizeable market share.
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.
