DTH
The party continues on Tata Sky Mobile app
MUMBAI: The Tata Sky Mobile App streamed every pulsating beat spinning out from the turntables of the EDM scene’s biggest stars to smartphones around the country, as the second day of the Ola Sunburn Festival 2017 turned the volume up on the year’s biggest party.
DJ Snake and the increasingly popular female DJ, Teri Miko, were among the local and international acts performing on the second day of the festival, as track after track of crowd rousing music was pumped out at Pune’s Oxford Golf Resort and on phones around India.
At the Ola Stage, things kicked off with Kash Trivedi, a house music producer dropping his best tracks. He was followed by Krosses, Paratara, Hollaphonic and the final act by Sartek, the first Indian DJ to be featured by Hardwell’s Revealed Recordings.
As the sun set at the Empire of the Sun 2.0 stage, Teri Miko was getting the party started by playing some of her best tracks. Swedish producer Salvatore Ganacci took over from Teri, and then made way for Kayzo, who set the stage for the final act by DJ Snake who got the crowd grooving with his wildly popular track, ‘Lean On’.
Every throbbing beat from the opening day of Ola Sunburn 2017 was streamed live on Tata Sky’s mobile app. India’s leading content distribution platform has tied up with the festival, one of the largest in the world, to bring its eclectic mix of music, entertainment, experiences, celebration and lifestyle straight to the smartphone.
Apart from streaming every second of the action from each of the festival’s four days live, the app, open to all users including non-subscribers, will also showcase nearly 500 hours of additional content, including after movies, artist interviews and exclusive backstage footage.
The sheer depth of content on offer, which will be archived on the app for viewing after the festival ends, will allow EDM fans to fully immerse themselves in the 11th edition of Asia’s largest music festival on-the-go, wherever and whenever they like.
The third day of Ola Sunburn 2017 kicks off Saturday afternoon and will feature 23 acts, including KSHMR, Nucleya and Clean Bandits.
Fans can watch every second of it live on the Tata Sky Mobile App. So, don’t miss out. Download the app now and be a party of the biggest party of the year.
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.
