DTH
Tata Sky launches ‘TV is Good’ campaign for Kids!
MUMBAI: Tata Sky, the leading DTH player in the country, launched its latest ad campaign ‘Ab Bachchey Seekhein TV se’ (Kids learn with television). The ad is set out to convey the fact that while television is a great entertainment medium, it is equally a good learning aid, helping children gain beyond bookish knowledge.
The campaign is targeted primarily at the parents with children between ages 6 to 12 years, trying to break the myth most Indian parents have on ‘television is only mindless viewing for kids’. Hence one of the three ad films features a young boy stating an interesting fact on how to find out if the eggs are old or new. Similarly the other two ads have two kinder garden aged girls quizzing the audience on facts about ‘rhyming words to orange’ or ‘how to escape a leopard’ that catch you by surprise and leaves you with a smile. All the three ad films deliver the overarching message – Television is good!
Vikram Mehra, Chief Commercial Officer, Tata Sky said, “Kids today are smart, not just studious. Give them the right content in an interesting package and see them absorb the knowledge at lightning speed. Over the last few years, Tata Sky’s pioneering efforts in ‘education through television’ with interactive (Actve) services and a bouquet of infotainment channels have been very well received by subscribers, specifically kids. With this campaign we wish to take the message to markets across the country on how fruitful learning through television can be.”
Elaborating on the ad campaign, Abhijit Avasthi, National Creative Director, Ogilvy & Mather, “If you ask any parent they would say that television and education are like chalk and cheese, rather most will insist that television gets in the way of education. But what we found out in research was quite the contrary. Parents are starting to recognize that there is enough wholesome content on television to supplement their kid’s academic learning, more so in smaller cities where there are very few avenues to give kids holistic education, television plays a role to provide that. Our campaign, ‘Kitna kuch seekh saktein hai bacche TV se’ features kids flaunting the interesting pieces of knowledge that they have learnt from the 13 learning channels that Tata Sky has to offer. Actually we ourselves learnt so much while shortlisting these knowledge facts for the campaign. That discovery only fueled our conviction that kids can learn so much from TV.”
· Name of the ad agency: Ogilvy & Mather
· Name of the creative director: Abhijit Avasthi
Isko laga daala toh TV jinga lala!
YouTube links to the three TVCs:
Orange – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uhWKas1YSM
Eggs – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9bErWRuglk
Leopard – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP9h2sf-aJA
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.
