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.

An approval issued by the Prasar Bharati managing committee on October 3, 2024, was clear that the work of preparing these child assets would go to a multimedia agency empanelled with the CBC. But copies of documents seen by Newslaundry show the work was actually done by VidUnit, not Ankur Media.

VidUnit was not among the five CBC-empanelled agencies selected for the task. It is not even empanelled with the CBC as a multimedia agency – it is restricted to the audio-visual category. No formal work order was ever issued for any of this – not before the work began, not after the platform launched, not even now.

Was it because of an exemption?

VidUnit’s name seems to have first appeared in this process nearly eight months after the task had been assigned. On June 8, 2025, Uma Iyer Rawla, a contractual expert (media operations and creatives) at Prasar Bharati, wrote to other executives, listing the details agency-wise and wrote “VidUnit” in parentheses just below “Ankur Media”. 

While VidUnit is a Mumbai-based influencer marketing and digital content agency, Ankur Media is a Gurugram-based advertising and media........

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