Prasar Bharati misses Pay Button in WAVES OTT app, earns Rs 2.9 crore

When Prasar Bharati unveiled WAVES, its Over-The-Top streaming platform at the 55th International Film Festival of India in Goa on November 20, 2024, the ambitions were unmistakable. 

The platform was positioned as India's public broadcaster's answer to Netflix, Hotstar, and YouTube: a hybrid streaming service offering video-on-demand, live TV, live radio, archival content, e-books, online games, and even an e-commerce window via the ONDC network. It was promoted as "Family Entertainment Ki Nayi Lehar."

Five months later, at the close of FY2024-25, WAVES had earned ₹2.90 crore in revenue from digital operations. 

The document states, "Subscriptions need to be purchased via the official website (waves.pb) since the app does not yet support in-app payments."

That figure disclosed in the commercial revenue breakdown table of Prasar Bharati's Annual Report 2024-25 sits alongside a platform that by any operational measure looks substantial. 

WAVES had, per the annual report, ingested 13,608 titles totalling 9,495 hours of content into its content management system. More than 13,000 of those titles had been published on the platform. It had streamed over 575 live events, including the Mahakumbh Amrit Snan, the 76th Republic Day parade,

Hockey India League, the Kabaddi World Cup and Mann Ki Baat. It was carrying 74 live TV channels and 12 radio channels. Over 10 lakh users had registered on the platform. And it had onboarded more than 200 content partners.

"That's not a launch number, that's a rounding error in the OTT industry," said a senior executive at a leading Indian streaming platform, speaking on condition of anonymity. "A mid-tier Indian YouTube creator with a million subscribers earns that in eight to ten months. A platform with a million registered users should be generating that in a week if the monetisation infrastructure is even minimally functional."

The Architecture of Ambition

To be fair to Prasar Bharati, WAVES was not built in a hurry on a shoestring. The annual report details a full organisational stack built around the platform under the Central Archives vertical: a Technology and IT Support unit managing cloud hosting, CDN, and media asset management; a Media Ingestion Room for transcoding content; a Graphics Unit; a Content Review and QC Unit; a Content Publishing Unit handling metadata, scheduling, and multilingual support; a Marketing and Distribution Unit; and a Billing and Reconciliation Unit managing subscriptions and ad revenue.

The technical infrastructure hosted entirely on a scalable cloud architecture with encryption, DRM, and a "sophisticated analytics dashboard" was built and integrated with platforms including OTT Play, Tata Play, and BSNL for wider distribution. 

The platform supports Video-on-Demand, Audio-on-Demand, live streaming, e-games, and e-shopping through ONDC integration. It even made content from the National Film Development Corporation, the Children's Film Division, and 23 photo albums from the Photo Division of PIB available to viewers.

This is not a pilot. It is a fully architected streaming operation. And yet it generated ₹2.90 crore in its first year in a market where the Indian OTT industry crossed ₹23,000 crore in revenue in 2024, according to industry estimates.

"The challenge with government-built platforms is rarely the technology," said a digital media consultant who has worked with multiple public and private broadcasters. 

"It's the go-to-market. You can build a phenomenal content management system, but if your monetisation layer is broken If users literally cannot pay you from within the app you haven't built a business, you've built a library."

That last point is not rhetorical. The annual report explicitly notes that while WAVES offers premium subscription features, "subscriptions need to be purchased via the official website (waves.pb) since the app does not yet support in-app payments." On a mobile-first platform, in a country where over 95% of OTT consumption happens on smartphones, the inability to transact inside the app is not a minor technical gap. It is the gap between a platform and a product.

The Content: Extraordinary Raw Material, Uncertain Monetisation

The content story behind WAVES is, in isolation, genuinely compelling. Prasar Bharati holds one of the most irreplaceable archives in the world, 45,154 hours of digitised Akashvani programming spanning 1,54,897 programmes, including rare performances of musicians, classical dancers, interviews with Prime Ministers, and recordings that exist nowhere else. 

Doordarshan's archive is similarly vast: 35,723 hours of legacy content digitised and stored, with 24,324 hours catalogued in its Media Asset Management System.

For FY2024-25, Akashvani Archives made 450 hours OTT-ready and ingested them into WAVES. The total Akashvani content previewed for the platform reached 700 hours. From Doordarshan, 1,400 hours of archival content (283 Hindi and English titles) were made OTT-ready and published, alongside another 900-plus hours of regional language content from various Doordarshan Kendras bringing the total archival content available on WAVES to over 3,800 hours.

The platform also carries classic shows including Ramayan and Shaktimaan, which have demonstrated enormous recall with Indian audiences.

"The IP they're sitting on is extraordinary," said the head of content strategy at a Mumbai-based streaming consultancy, who did not want to be identified. "Ramayan alone, if licensed properly, could be a revenue asset. The archive is priceless literally, in the sense that no one has ever properly priced it. But there's a difference between having great content and knowing what to do with it commercially."

The archival content sale numbers underscore this tension. In FY24, Prasar Bharati earned ₹3.38 crore from the sale and licensing of archival content a five-fold jump from ₹67 lakh the previous year, and a sign that demand exists. But ₹3.38 crore for an archive that took seven decades to build remains vanishingly small.

The PB Archives YouTube channel  a free platform with no paywall drove 119.78 million views and added 4,02,000 new subscribers in FY2024-25, crossing 1.7 million subscribers overall. DD News on YouTube has 5.84 million subscribers. These are enormous audiences. The problem, multiple industry executives note, is that audiences on free platforms are being given content for nothing that could, with the right model, generate significant revenue.

"They've essentially trained their audience to expect everything free," said a senior executive at a digital advertising firm. "Which might be fine from a public service mandate standpoint but it's in direct conflict with building a viable OTT business. You can't be JioHotstar and Netflix at the same time without a clear decision about which one you're actually trying to be."

The Revenue Model Problem

WAVES is described in the annual report as operating a "hybrid revenue model, blending advertisement and subscription-based services, with features like automated ad insertion." This is the standard AVOD-SVOD structure used by most major platforms. The gap between having the model and executing it, however, is significant.

The annual report acknowledges, in the section on Doordarshan's terrestrial transmitter strategy, that "streaming services like Netflix, Hotstar, YouTube etc." have transformed viewing behaviour. Indian consumers in 2024-25 were spoiled for streaming choice, with platforms offering aggressively priced subscription tiers, original content budgets in the hundreds of crores, and seamless payment infrastructure across UPI, cards, and telecom billing.

WAVES, by contrast, asks users who want premium content to navigate away from the app entirely, visit a separate website, complete a transaction there, and return. In the era of one-tap UPI payments, this is a friction point that most users will simply not cross.

However, as the public broadcaster resolves these issues, the user base continues to shift due to better content and increasing demand for entertainment.