DTH
D2H brand increases focus on South, launches new customer awareness TVC campaign
MUMBAI: D2H, brand of Dish TV India Limited, the world’s largest single-country DTH Company, has launched a 360-degree TVC campaign for its southern market, highlighting the maximum number of entertainment offerings by the brand. Titled “Go for Highera”, the campaign is urging customers to not settle for less, but ask for more. Conceptualized by Lowe Lintas, the TVC campaign is now live and is being rolled out in the three southern languages across the three southern states.
With an aim to connect with potential customers in South India, D2H’s ‘Go for Highera’ a 360-degree TVC campaign is being promoted on social media & digital platforms, cinema and print media to reach out to larger audience.
The TVC opens with a simile of splashing water to wake up the viewer by the protagonist to bust the myth about the content provided to customers in the name of highest channels offerings. The TVC ends with urging the viewer to wake up and go for the “higher than the highest” number of channels in his language.
Commenting on the campaign launch, Mr. Anil Dua, Group CEO – Dish TV India Limited said, “In the south, our D2H brand is a strong player. We have ramped up our distribution, strengthened our service network and enhanced our product, both in terms of content and attractive entry-level offerings. With our new campaign “Go for Highera”, we are aiming to take D2H brand to a leadership position. The campaign aims at highlighting our value proposition of providing best of regional content and establishing our content leadership in the market. The campaign brings out assertively that when it comes to content offerings in regional languages, D2H platform is clearly the best.”
Speaking on the new advertising campaign, Mr. Sugato Banerji, Corporate Head- Marketing, D2H brand, said, “According to our in-house research and consumer insights, consumers are choosing DTH service basis the content offerings before any other factors come into play. This insight led us to strengthen our channels in each of the four south languages and bring ‘Go for Highera’ campaign for the south market to create an awareness among customers on content offerings. The campaign’s objective is to bust the myth about content leadership and translate that to favourable gains of market share.”
Mr. Sajid Khan, Unit Creative Director, Lowe Lintas said, “The core idea of ‘Go for Highera’ campaign was to awaken the customers to not settle for anything that they’re being offered in the name of entertainment. With our collaboration with D2H, a brand of DishTV India Ltd, we’re creating awareness for the brand’s maximum entertainment offerings in the regional languages for its South subscribers. With this campaign, we’re hoping to make the brand more appealing to the target audience.”
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.
