← Business Models: Industry Specific (Consumer, Services & Financial) (all topics)
Free-to-paid conversion - free-to-air news
What it is
Channels broadcast without subscription charge, earning entirely from advertising. Most Indian news channels are FTA, distributed widely including on the free DTH platform DD Free Dish
TRAI rules require a channel's status to be consistent across platforms - a pay channel cannot be free on one platform and paid on another, which forced several broadcasters to choose
Impact on industries
- Maximises reach, which is the whole business model for news - a wider audience is directly saleable to advertisers with no subscription friction
- DD Free Dish delivers enormous rural and small-town reach that no pay platform matches, at slot-auction cost rather than per-subscriber carriage
- Forfeits subscription revenue entirely, and the consistency rule forces a hard choice - stay free everywhere or withdraw and lose the reach
- Combined with the ad cap and suspended ratings, an advertising-only model has no lever left: inventory is fixed, price needs ratings, and ratings are frozen