Prasar Bharati is seeking participation from private sector TV broadcasters on their proposed over-the-top (OTT) platform and, amongst other sops, offering a 65:35 revenue share in favour of private broadcasters.

The revenue share will be calculated after adjusting Prasar Bharati‘s expenses for the channel, including transcoding, CDN costs, and agency commissions.

According to a report in the Economic Times, which quoted a notification from Prasar Bharati that’s on its website, only those TV channels that are permitted by the Indian government will be eligible to join the proposed streaming platform.

The deadline for sending applications is August 12. Prasar Bharati plans to launch an OTT platform to promote Indian values and knowledge through family-friendly content.

Broadcasters who want to place channels on the Prasar Bharati OTT platform must provide SCTE-35/ad marker-enabled feeds of the channel indicating the start and end times of ad breaks.

The public broadcaster will categorise TV channels on the proposed OTT app into four groups based on language and genre, including English news channels, Hindi news channels, non-news channels (all languages), and non-news channels (regional).

Successful channels will have to provide a clean feed for streaming on the OTT platform.

Prasar Bharati will insert ads on the OTT stream based on the availability of the SCTE-35 marker at the appropriate juncture.

Unsold commercial time will be used for running promos for Prasar Bharati and its partner channels.

The Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP) rate card will be used to rank all applicant TV channels.

Channels with the highest DAVP rates in their respective categories will be allowed to place their channels on the OTT platform.