DTH
VZY makes a star turn as TOIFA 2025’s special partner
MUMBAI: Lights, camera, integration, that’s the script VZY seems to be chasing as it steps into the spotlight as special partner of The Times of India Film Awards (TOIFA) 2025. For a brand built on next-generation entertainment, partnering with one of India’s most credible film honours feels less like a surprise and more like a scene waiting to be shot.
VZY, the new entertainment brand from Dish TV India, is fast positioning itself as a future-ready force, and its flagship offering VZY TV is central to that push. Designed for digital-first households who refuse to juggle convoluted remotes and scattered content, VZY TV blends smart tech, a sleek interface, live TV, OTT apps, and personalised recommendations into one easy, intuitive screen. The pitch is clear: simplicity, speed, and seamless discovery.
That promise makes its partnership with TOIFA 2025 a natural alignment. Known for its credibility and sharp evaluation standards, TOIFA stands apart in an awards landscape that often gets muddied by popularity metrics. The platform is backed by the TOIFA Academy and guided by an elite Advisory Council, with a multi-layered screening process that covers both OTT and theatrical Hindi cinema. In a move that reinforces transparency, every stage is audited by Ernst & Young, a rarity in the awards space and a reminder of why TOIFA continues to be one of Hindi cinema’s most respected honours.
For VZY, the association extends beyond branding, it is a statement of intent. As Indian audiences demand faster, smarter, and more integrated entertainment experiences, the brand wants to sit at the intersection of technology and culture, a positioning TOIFA helps amplify.
Dish TV India CEO & executive director Manoj Dobhal framed it as a strategic bridge between technology and storytelling. “VZY TV stands at the forefront of our vision to redefine how India experiences entertainment, smart, seamless, and deeply immersive,” he said. “Our association with TOIFA 2025 adds a meaningful cultural dimension to that journey.”
Echoing the sentiment, The Times of India CEO Sivakumar Sundaram emphasised TOIFA’s widened canvas this year. With its renewed focus on both OTT and theatrical brilliance, TOIFA 2025 is set to recognise “the full spectrum of India’s storytelling talent,” backed by a process rooted in credibility and inclusion.
This year’s ceremony is expected to bring together leading actors, filmmakers, and industry powerhouses for an evening dedicated to cinematic excellence. As Special Partner, VZY will help expand the event’s reach and enrich the viewer experience, reinforcing its ambition to shape the next chapter of Indian entertainment.
With VZY TV pushing smarter ways to watch and TOIFA celebrating the finest films of the year, the partnership feels like a coming-together of two worlds, one redefining how stories are told, the other redefining how they’re experienced.
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.
