Prasar Bharati to launch OTT platform; releases draft tender outlining goals, specifications
The proposed OTT as per the draft tender would also have advertising solutions and shall support personalised and targeted ads.
In the era of rising demand for connected TV and streaming services, public broadcaster, Prasar Bharati, is venturing into the OTT space. In late September 2023, the pubcaster released a draft Request for Proposal (RFP) document, outlining goals, features of the platform, vendor bidding processes, and additional specifications.
“Prasar Bharati intends to design, develop, commission, operate and maintain an Over The Top (OTT) platform for its content available and for the reach of all the citizens in India, even remotest village as well as global audience. The intended OTT platform is required to function in a lag and buffer free environment giving all set of users a state of the art and lag free viewing experience,” the draft RPF document said.
The 273 pager document highlights the bidding process, the qualification of a legit bid, the selection procedure and a lot of other technical details.
However the gist of the scope of work earmarked for this project shall be for development, commissioning, hosting, testing, operations, and maintenance of an OTT platform for Prasar Bharati.
The feature requirements in the RPF document widely say that the platform intends to have plans for subscription that would be offered to individual users as well as family users (subject to a maximum five profiles). Content available on the platform as per the document should support radio streaming, standard definition (SD), high definition (HD) and ultra high definition.
While bidders are open to make suggestions on services that could be offered on the proposed platform, the draft tender said the proposed solution shall be able to categorize VoD content into multiple categories, but not limited to movies on demand, educational, TV series, including support of seasons and episodes and documentary.
The document also defines ad models for the proposed platform. Among other options, the advertisement supported functionality the proposed solution shall provide advertisement insertion solution(s) for OTT subscribers by inserting or replacing video advertisements in a fully automated manner.
“The proposed solution shall provide pre-roll and mid-roll advertisements based on their position or placement in the video playback, end-to-end solution for server-side ad insertion and shall support personalized and targeted advertisements,” said the document.
