MUMBAI: In India’s digital bazaar, content might be king—but figuring out how to sell it is the real blood sport. At IndianTelevision.com’s 21 Video and Broadband Summit 2025, the panel “Streaming and Distribution: Serving the Right Mix” brought together a lively brigade of streaming leaders to unpack how OTT, aggregators, and even Doordarshan’s new digital avatars are reshaping content distribution for the next three years.

Session chair IndianTelevision.com Group founder, chairman & editor in chief Anil Wanvari guided a sharp conversation with Amazon MX Player director & head of content Amogh Dusad, Chana Jor director & CEO Pratap Jain, Shemaroo COO - digital Saurabh Srivastava, Prasar Bharati deputy director general Amit Kumar, and Jojo App founder Dhruvin Shah on what the future of streaming might really look like—and it wasn’t all glamour and glossy originals.

Shah said they started with an ad-supported (AVOD) model because jumping straight into subscriptions would have sunk them. “Even with bigger value propositions, if we had slapped a price tag on day one, I don’t think we would have been where we are,” he confessed. Today, Jojo boasts over 5.5–6 million downloads and an emerging subscription base, with one paid user for every three free users.

Srivastava remained cautious. While Shemaroo has built a direct-to-consumer OTT business, he acknowledged syndication continues to outpace subscription revenues. “In India, what should happen and what is happening are two different things,” Srivastava said, backing AVOD and hybrid models for immediate scalability. About 70–75 per cent of Shemaroo’s OTT revenue today still flows from its D2C subscription play, with Gujarati and Hindi content split evenly.

Jain described aggregation as a double-edged sword. “Yes, you can scale fast through partnerships, but your net ARPU drops,” he admitted. Still, Chana Jor, live on Watcho and Airtel , boasts 40,000 direct paying users and around 400,000 downloads.

Kumar meanwhile shared how their ‘Waves’ OTT platform—spun off from Doordarshan—was engineered differently. “We avoided brand confusion by keeping Waves separate from DD and AIR," he said. Targeting a freemium model, Waves already hit three million downloads with a bold aim of 10 million by year-end. Unique shows like Kisan Cricket League and Kheton ke Khiladi are designed to tap the farmer and rural youth demographic, blending sports, farming and ground-level engagement.

Monetisation challenges loomed large. Kumar flagged low CPM rates in India, high ad-serving costs, and patchy ad inventory. He suggested innovations like offering micro-credits to users to ease small-ticket payments and boost transaction volumes in TVOD models.

The panel agreed: Indians don’t mind watching ads—evidenced by YouTube’s Indian dominance and DTH models— but purely ad-funded OTT isn’t a silver bullet. Subscription and freemium hybrids are the future, with content quality and clever marketing crucial to success.

In a land of one billion screens, it’s not the platform with the loudest ad campaign that wins. It’s the one that convinces a user to stay—and maybe, just maybe, pay.