A draft Expression of Interest would empanel AI startups and studios to make short-form video, microdramas, dubbing, digital-human anchors, and restored archives for the national broadcaster — with no minimum-turnover barrier.
2026-09-15 · by Moe Ameen
Published 2026-09-15 · Updated
Short answer
Prasar Bharati, India's public broadcaster, issued a draft Expression of Interest in September 2026 to empanel AI startups, studios and tech firms to make content for WAVES, Doordarshan, Akashvani and DD India. It covers nine categories, from short-form video and microdramas to AI dubbing, digital humans and archive restoration. There is no minimum turnover requirement. Feedback was due by September 21, 2026, and empanelment does not guarantee paid work.
Key takeaways
Prasar Bharati, India's public-service broadcaster, has issued a draft Expression of Interest (EOI) to empanel AI startups, production studios, and technology firms to create and process content for its platforms — the WAVES OTT service, Doordarshan (television), Akashvani/All India Radio, and DD India. The draft was reported in mid-September 2026, with the broadcaster inviting industry comments and counter-suggestions by September 21, 2026. Because this is a draft out for consultation, the exact category definitions and terms may shift before the final EOI.
The proposed empanelment runs two years and spans nine content categories: short-form videos (roughly 30 seconds to 3 minutes), microdramas, music videos, intermediate series (about 8–10 minutes), regular series (25–30 minutes), feature films (90+ minutes), archive restoration and repurposing, AI-based localization/translation/dubbing, and AI avatars and digital humans. The archive work is a specific focus — using AI to denoise, color-grade, upscale to 4K, and add metadata tagging to decades of Doordarshan and Akashvani material so it can be re-presented to modern audiences.
The framework is deliberately open to small firms. Prasar Bharati has described it as "capability-first" and "turnover-agnostic," dropping any minimum-revenue prerequisite; reporting describes a 100-mark scoring matrix weighted toward technical architecture, creative capability, and live demonstration pilots, with a minimum threshold to be empanelled. Empanelment does not guarantee work — assignments would come through RFPs, pitches, pilots, or direct orders.
The draft also sets governance guardrails. It reportedly prohibits deepfakes of living public figures without written authorization, requires C2PA-compliant provenance metadata and disclosure that a persona is synthetic, mandates human editorial approval, and favors Indian-developed AI models and domestic cloud infrastructure with limits on overseas data storage.
Whether or not you chase an empanelment slot, the signal is what to act on: the demand is for AI content produced as a catalog — short-form, microdramas, digital-human anchors, format after format, on a schedule. That is a production-capacity problem, and it is exactly the problem Kompozy is built for. To qualify, or just to ride the wave the moment it validates, you need to show you can turn one idea into many finished formats fast — and Kompozy is the engine that does it. From a single brief it generates face-locked, recurring digital presenters with Persona Shorts, vertical Clipped Shorts with burned-in captions from any long-form cut, plus Carousel Posts and Quote Graphics rendered brand-exact through HyperFrames, Text Posts, Blog Articles, and Email Newsletters.
The parts of the EOI a creator can meet today map cleanly: a consistent AI anchor is a persona in the AI Influencer pool; a slate of daily short-form and microdrama-style clips is what the video formats produce at cadence; and the whole catalog stays on one voice via the Persona Brief with banned-phrase filters — the governance instinct the draft is pushing the whole industry toward. Then Autopilot schedules and fans the output across the eight social platforms plus blog and email, behind a per-post human review gate — the "human editorial approval" the draft requires, built in. Prasar Bharati is defining what AI content production at national scale looks like; Kompozy is how an independent team produces at that scale without a broadcast facility. Kompozy handles the production and publishing, not archive restoration or multilingual dubbing — for those the EOI expects specialist partners.
A real AI avatar video made in the Kompozy workspace, shown as an example of the format. It was not made about this story.
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Prasar Bharati's draft Expression of Interest would empanel AI startups, studios, and tech firms to create and process content for WAVES (its OTT app), Doordarshan, Akashvani/All India Radio, and DD India. The proposed nine categories span short-form videos, microdramas, music videos, series, feature films, AI localization and dubbing, AI avatars and digital humans, and restoring its historical archives.
It is a draft out for consultation. Prasar Bharati invited industry comments and counter-suggestions by September 21, 2026, and the final terms may change afterward. The proposed empanelment period is two years.
That is the intent. Prasar Bharati described the framework as "capability-first" and "turnover-agnostic," removing any minimum-revenue prerequisite. Selection reportedly leans on a scored matrix covering technical architecture, creative capability, and a live demonstration pilot — so a working pipeline and demo matter more than company size. Empanelment lets you pitch; it does not guarantee assignments.
The draft reportedly prohibits deepfakes of living public figures without written authorization, requires C2PA-compliant provenance metadata and disclosure when a persona is synthetic, mandates human editorial approval before publication, and favors Indian-developed AI models and domestic cloud infrastructure with limits on overseas data storage.
We checked every figure, date, quote and product claim on this page against the sources listed below on 2026-10-23, and removed or rewrote anything we could not confirm. The categories, scoring, safeguards and two-year term come from exchange4media and Indian Television. The September 21 deadline comes from Storyboard18. We changed "colorize" to "color grading" to match the draft's wording. Kompozy plan and product details come from kompozy.io/pricing.
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