DTH
Watcho and Cloud TV switch on seamless entertainment for smart TV viewers
MUMBAI: India’s smart TV experience is about to get a major upgrade as Dish TV’s Watcho joins forces with Cloud Walker’s Cloud TV OS to make premium content more accessible than ever. The collaboration aims to redefine home entertainment, integrating Watcho’s vast catalogue with over 200 smart TV brands, eliminating multiple logins and simplifying access for millions of users.
As the smart TV market in India grows at a CAGR of 13.11 per cent, the demand for seamless, cost-effective entertainment is skyrocketing. This partnership taps into that trend, ensuring Watcho’s content reaches over 18 million users across 6 million devices, bringing together a world of movies, web series, live sports, and more all on one platform.
With Cloud TV OS, Watcho subscribers can log in once and start streaming instantly, without juggling multiple credentials. The interface will also feature personalised recommendations, a ‘continue watching’ option, and exclusive Cloud TV Bundles, offering bundled subscriptions to leading OTT platforms.
Dish TV chief revenue officer Sukhpreet Singh said, “At Dish, we recognize that the future of entertainment lies in seamless, integrated experiences. With smart TVs becoming the preferred screen for digital content, our partnership with Cloud Walker is a strategic step toward making Watcho’s vast content library effortlessly accessible to millions. By embedding Watcho into Cloud TV OS, we are not just expanding our reach—we are redefining how India consumes content, making premium entertainment more intuitive, affordable, and frictionless.”
Cloud TV co-founder & COO Abhijeet Rajpurohit said, “We’re thrilled to partner with DishTV Watcho under CloudTV Bundle, making premium entertainment more accessible than ever. With Watcho’s vast content library now integrated into 200 plus TV brands, over 12 million viewers can seamlessly access to top OTT platforms all through a single subscription.”
With Cloud Walker serving over 10 million users, this collaboration positions Dish TV Watcho at the forefront of India’s evolving connected TV landscape. As more consumers shift towards Connected TV (CTV), this move ensures that Watcho remains a key player in the industry.
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.
