OTT & Satellite Distribution

Content that nobody can watch has no value. The gap between a finished master and an audience is filled with technical specifications, metadata schemas, encoding ladders, rights registers and carriage agreements — unglamorous work that determines whether a production earns anything at all.

Sunad Broadcast manages distribution for producers, broadcasters, institutions and brands: preparing content to platform specification, delivering it through the right route, and keeping track of what is licensed where and for how long.

The Indian distribution landscape

India runs several distribution systems in parallel, and most content eventually touches more than one.

Linear television still delivers the largest single audiences in the country, reaching viewers through DTH operators, cable multi-system operators and terrestrial broadcast. It is governed by carriage economics — a channel pays to be carried, and placement in the electronic programme guide materially affects viewership.

Subscription OTT platforms commission and acquire premium long-form content, pay meaningful licence fees, and impose the strictest technical and metadata requirements of any route.

Advertising-supported OTT and FAST channels have grown quickly, monetising through advertising rather than subscription and consuming large volumes of library content.

Open platforms — YouTube above all — remain the largest single video destination in India and require no gatekeeper, which makes them the default first route for independent producers.

These routes are not mutually exclusive. A well-managed title moves through a sequence of windows: an initial exclusive platform window, then wider OTT availability, then linear television, then library exploitation. Planning that sequence before the first release is what maximises total return.

OTT platform delivery

Technical preparation

Every platform publishes a delivery specification and enforces it automatically. The elements are broadly consistent even when the details differ: a high-quality mezzanine master, usually ProRes 422 HQ or an IMF package; audio delivered as separated stems along with finished 5.1 and stereo mixes at the platform's loudness target; timed-text subtitle files per language; and artwork in several fixed ratios.

We prepare all of it and run pre-delivery QC against the target specification before submission. Rejections are expensive in time — a failed ingest can push a release date by weeks while a slot is rebooked — and almost all of them are avoidable.

Metadata and discovery

Metadata is not administration; it is how the title gets found. Platform recommendation systems rely on genre, mood, cast, keywords and synopsis fields, and a title with a thin metadata record will be under-recommended regardless of how good it is.

We build complete metadata packages: long and short synopses at each required length, full cast and crew with role codes, genre and sub-genre, mood and theme tagging, language and certification data, and key art in every ratio the platform surfaces. Where a platform supports it, we also supply trailers and preview clips, which measurably improve conversion.

Localisation

India is a multilingual market and a title released in one language reaches a fraction of its potential audience. We produce subtitles as properly timed text — reading-speed controlled, line-broken sensibly, positioned to avoid on-screen text — rather than as a mechanical transcript, and we supervise dubbing end to end where a dubbed version is commissioned.

Satellite and linear distribution

Putting a channel on satellite involves a chain of parties: the playout facility, a teleport for uplink, satellite bandwidth leased on a transponder, and carriage agreements with each DTH and cable platform that will carry the signal.

We coordinate that chain — specifying and procuring encoder and uplink paths, working with teleport operators on link budgets and redundancy, and supporting negotiations with distribution platforms. Regulatory compliance sits alongside it: channel permission from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, downlink permissions, compliance recording retention and the reporting obligations that accompany a broadcasting licence.

It is worth being blunt about the economics. Satellite carriage is expensive, and for many content owners today a linear channel is not the right answer — a strong OTT and FAST strategy reaches more of the target audience for a fraction of the cost. We will say so when we think it is true.

Rights management

Distribution is fundamentally a rights business, and most avoidable losses in this industry come from rights that were never properly recorded.

We maintain a rights register for each title covering underlying rights such as script, music and archive; talent agreements and their usage limits; the territories, media and languages licensed; the term and any exclusivity windows; and the reversion dates when rights come back to the owner.

That register answers the questions that otherwise stall a deal: can this title go to a new platform next year, can it be dubbed into Tamil, can the trailer be used in a social campaign, does the music licence cover streaming as well as broadcast. A platform's legal team will ask for exactly this documentation during onboarding, and having it ready is often the difference between closing in weeks and closing in months.

Encoding, packaging and delivery infrastructure

Between a master file and a viewer sits an encoding and packaging chain, and its design determines both quality and cost.

The bitrate ladder. Adaptive streaming serves several renditions of the same content at different bitrates and resolutions, and the player selects between them as bandwidth changes. A ladder designed for Indian viewing conditions needs meaningful low-bitrate rungs, because a large share of the audience watches on mobile data with variable throughput. A ladder that starts at 1080p and drops only to 720p will buffer for millions of viewers.

Codec choice. H.264 remains the universal baseline and plays everywhere. H.265 delivers roughly the same quality at substantially lower bitrate, which matters enormously when you are paying for delivery, but device support is narrower. AV1 is better again and narrower still. In practice most services encode H.264 for compatibility and add H.265 for devices that support it.

Packaging and DRM. HLS for Apple devices and DASH for most others, with the appropriate DRM system where the licence requires protection. For premium licensed content, studio-approved DRM is usually a contractual obligation rather than a choice.

Per-title encoding. An animated title and a dark, grainy documentary do not need the same bitrate to look equally good. Analysing each title and adapting the ladder accordingly can cut delivery cost meaningfully at scale without any visible quality loss.

Building a direct-to-consumer service

Some content owners are better served by their own platform than by licensing to someone else's — typically those with a devoted, identifiable audience and a deep library: devotional and spiritual content, regional-language libraries, educational providers and special-interest publishers.

A viable direct service needs a content management layer, transcoding and packaging, a content delivery network, apps for web, Android, iOS and connected television, a payment layer that handles Indian methods including UPI, and analytics. We can specify and integrate that stack, and equally often we advise against it — a service launched with forty hours of content and no marketing budget will not recover its build cost.

The sound test is simple: if you cannot name the audience, describe why they would pay, and fund twelve months of content and marketing, licensing to an existing platform is the better decision.

Reporting and performance

Once a title is live, the useful work is measurement. We consolidate reporting across platforms into a single view — views and completion rates, revenue by window and territory, audience demographics where the platform shares them — so that the next commissioning decision is made on evidence.

Completion rate in particular is worth watching closely, because it is the metric most platforms weight most heavily in their own recommendation logic. A title with modest views and a high completion rate will often out-earn a title with the reverse profile.

Working with us on distribution

We take on distribution in three shapes. As a service, preparing and delivering content that a client has already licensed. As a managed function, acting as the distribution department for a producer or institution without one. And as a partner, where we invest delivery and localisation costs against a share of revenue for titles we believe in.

If you have finished content sitting unreleased, or a slate you want to place, tell us what you have and what rights you hold. If you are still in production, talk to us early — building the delivery requirements into the production plan is far cheaper than retro-fitting them, and it is the single most common saving we are able to hand a producer.