DTH
DTH payment system provider BuySmart completes a Decade
MUMBAI: Starting their operations in 2005, the Indo-Israeli company began with Tata Sky, Videocon D2H and Sun DTH as their earliest clients and taking their service offering across India through an electronic distribution system. Over the next few years, the company strengthened its digital distribution on a pan India presence and also built a payment super highway with a scalable and robust technology that supports their B2B2C business model.
EPRS BuySmart has, since then, expanded into offering a basket of products through their strong network of more 2.5 lakh retail outlets in more than 35,000 towns in India. As their technology works in the absence of strong Internet infrastructure also, the company has been able to reach Tier III/IV towns and villages in India, and currently, the company counts more than 300,000+ transactions/day on their platform. With the earlier focus on telecom & DTH, the company has now expanded into financial, logistics, utility payment and e-commerce segments of business with association with Tata Sky, Airtel, ICICI Bank, RBL, Dish TV, and Reliance BIG TV to name a few.
Speaking on the occasion of the company’s 10th anniversary, Himanshoo Patil, Chief Executive Officer, EPRS-BuySmart, said, “EPRS-BuySmart was established with a view of revolutionizing the digital distribution and payment industry and help service providers reach out to all corners of the country and enable SMEs/entrepreneurs to offers consumer services at their retail points. I am glad that in these 10 years we have been able to come up as the catalyst of growth, prosperity and empowerment for the bottom of the pyramid population as well for the small business owners. It is encouraging to see that what EPRS-BuySmart is doing is in line with the current agenda of our nation’s leadership. We look forward to taking this forward in building a stronger brand over the next decade!”
The company’s proposition to enable product sales on demand, at 2.5 lakh retail points across the nation is unique and unmatched, thus allowing the manufacturers and brands to save 20% on their cost in reaching out to end customers in a quick, economical and effective way.
Services based on cutting-edge technology have helped create opportunities and employment for retailers at the bottom of the pyramid while exposing Indians at every corner of the country to mainstream services and products. EPRS BuySmart looks to further its vision by investing in their technology to offer a larger bouquet of products in the future.
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.
