In November 2024, India’s public broadcaster, Prasar Bharati, launched its OTT platform, Waves. To prepare thumbnails and metadata for the platform’s content, Prasar Bharati arrived at a figure of Rs 3.87 crore, payable to five multimedia agencies empanelled with the Central Bureau of Communication (CBC), picked out of a list of 21. Of this, close to 74 percent was earmarked for a single company: Ankur Media Private Limited.
Thumbnails and metadata are what the broadcaster calls “child assets” – supporting materials, including posters and infographics, that help viewers navigate content on an OTT platform. Metadata itself is the information tagged to a title: its description, genre, language, duration, cast, keywords and release date.
