Tata Play Darshan goes paid at Rs 11/month after a long free run

New Delhi: Tata Play has priced its long-running devotional service Tata Play Darshan at Rs 11 per month, a shift that stands out because the offering has historically sat in the “default utility” bucket for many DTH homes, rather than being marketed like a premium add-on.

The Tata Play site now lists Darshan (tune-in 1056) as a paid service.

Tata Sky (now Tata Play) launched Darshan as part of its early interactive services push in November 2007, positioning it as a dedicated devotional destination on the Tata Sky Actve layer.

That puts the service’s shift-to-paid timeline at roughly 18 years, far longer than Tata Play’s current playbook for most of its in-house linear add-ons.

Darshan is a habit-led service. Viewers tend to sample it in short bursts and many households keep it on as a background devotional feed.

The switch fits a wider platform trend: small-ticket subscriptions tend to convert better when the product already sits inside a routine.

At Rs 11, the pricing is calibrated as a low-friction add-on rather than a high-consideration channel purchase.

Tata Play has built a shelf of operator-packaged linear services across devotion and movies, typically marketed with a short free preview and then placed behind a monthly subscription.

For example, Tata Play Deiveegam (Tamil devotional) is pitched as free for the first 3 days, then Rs 60/month. Similarly, Tata Play Telugu Cinema is free for the first 3 days, then Rs 60/month.

Darshan, in that sense, is a late conversion of an older utility service into the same paid-shelf framework Tata Play has used for newer operator-led channels.

The development also underlines where DTH operators are trying to defend ARPU: not only through broadcaster bouquets, but through operator-controlled, micro-priced linear offerings that can be stacked over time.

At scale, even a low-ticket service like Darshan can become a steady monetisation line, particularly because devotional viewing tends to be resilient and the pricing is unlikely to trigger a high churn response.