DTH
Why Tata Sky’s Harit Nagpal is pained about the MPEG-4 STB rollout
MUMBAI: A press release hit indiantelevision.com yesterday disclosing how US chip company Broadcom had got a massive order to supply standard definition MPEG-4 set top boxes (STBs) to Tata Sky. A simple release right. But it surely got the goose of Tata Sky managing director Harit Nagpal.
Tata Sky MD Harit Nagpal is still awaiting a response from ISRO officials
“This entire exercise is costing Tata Sky about Rs 1000 crore,” was Nagpal’s admission, when indiantelevision.com called him up. “We are replacing close to 5-6 million MPEG-2 SD STBs at no cost to consumers over the next year. All of this is coming in from internal accruals.” Nagpal says the DTH operator normally supplies about three million STBs a year for new acquisitions and churn. “This year we will be doing about 9-10 million STBs,” says he.
The volumes have forced him to bring in emergency teams to make sure they install 500,000 STBs a month (made by Huawei and Humax apart from other international STB makers). This is apart from the regular service teams, which handle regular installation and problems.
“For us even at Tata Sky it is a massive exercise and we have been working on it for the past three months and have just started the rollout,” he reveals.
But isn’t that good? “Upgrading the boxes will give me more capacity for 12-14 channels,” he admits. “But I am being forced to do this because Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) has yet to give me my transponders. I could have put this money elsewhere on expanding my digitisation plans.”
Tata Sky’s signals are being beamed off Insat 4A; but it had signed a contract to lease 12 transponders on ISRO’s GSAT-10 satellite around five years ago which have not been delivered to Tata Sky yet, even after the satellite launched in to space in September 2012.
“It is sad that after national publications and a medium such as yours have carried my complaint against ISRO, I have not got a single revert from it about our transponders. We intend to take legal action since all our attempts to reach ISRO have failed. The courts are on vacation now, when they open again, we will move them,” added Nagpal.
The transponders would have allowed Tata Sky to increase its channel offerings to consumers. However, now the new STBs will allow Tata Sky to add more channels to its bouquet. “We have been adding channels in a phased manner; the process will now be accelerated with the MPEG-4 STB. By June-July next year we should be able to revise our channel offerings to consumers,” said Nagpal.
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.
