NEW DELHI, October 11 — India’s autonomous public service broadcaster Prasar Bharati, under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), on Sunday expanded its newly launched indigenous Over-The-Top (OTT) digital streaming platform 'WAVES', onboarding 65 live television channels, clean family entertainment, and digitized historical archives across more than 12 scheduled Indian languages.
Available free-to-stream across mobile and smart television ecosystems, WAVES curates iconic Doordarshan and Akashvani (All India Radio) cultural repositories—including restored classics like Bharat Ek Khoj, Ramayan, and archival speeches of freedom fighters—alongside live sports, regional cinema, cybersecurity awareness modules, and native e-commerce integration powered by the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).
Concurrently, Prasar Bharati in technical partnership with IIT Kanpur and Saankhya Labs expanded field trials of indigenous 'Direct-to-Mobile' (D2M) terrestrial broadcast technology across 15 urban clusters. D2M enables direct transmission of live multimedia television and emergency disaster alerts directly to smartphones using terrestrial broadcast spectrum (526-582 MHz band) without consuming cellular internet data or requiring an active SIM card.
The statutory mandate of Prasar Bharati under the Prasar Bharati (Broadcasting Corporation of India) Act, 1990 (operationalized in 1997 encompassing Doordarshan and Akashvani), the physics and spectrum efficiency of Direct-to-Mobile (D2M) ATSC 3.0 next-gen broadcasting, and three-tier self-regulatory oversight for OTT platforms under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 are high-yield themes across UPSC Civil Services (GS-II & GS-III).