India's CTV Audience Hits 207M, Ad Spend Lags

A 43-inch smart TV in India costs less than half what it did five years ago. That price collapse is the real reason 207 million Indians now watch television through an internet connection instead of a cable box or antenna.

The number comes from a joint WPP Media and Trade Desk report, "The Connected TV Era: India's New Prime Time," built on Ormax Media's 2026 OTT Audience Study (over 12,000 respondents) plus a dedicated survey of 3,000 urban CTV viewers run in May-June 2026. Connected TV, meaning any smart TV, streaming stick, or console pulling internet video onto the big screen, now reaches those 207 million people across an estimated 62-65 million households, roughly three times the audience it had in 2022.

Where the growth is actually coming from

CTV used to be an urban, premium-household story. That's flipped.

More than two-thirds of urban NCCS A (the top income bracket) households already own a CTV device, so the easy urban growth is largely spent. Every recent gain is coming from villages, small towns, and mid-tier cities buying their first smart TV, driven by the same panel-cost decline that made the whole category possible.

Rahul Kapoor, VP Partnerships at The Trade Desk:

"The cost of panels... over the years, we have seen the cost of panels come down significantly."

That's the entire mechanism behind the curve above: cheaper hardware, not a sudden change in what rural India wants to watch.

The audience is 207 million. The ad money is much smaller

Here's the gap that matters. India's total ad market (adex) is projected at roughly ₹2 lakh crore in 2026, growing about 9.7%. CTV's share of that is somewhere between ₹6,800 crore and ₹8,000 crore, growing faster at around 22% a year, but still landing at roughly 4% of total ad spend, expected to reach about 17% of TV and professional video budgets by the end of the year.

Put differently: CTV's audience has already tripled, but the ad dollars following it are still catching up from a small base. That gap is either the opportunity (advertisers who move early get cheap reach before rates catch up to audience size) or a sign that 207 million is a generous count relative to what advertisers can actually verify. I'd bet on both being true at once, honestly. The report's own household math backs the second reading: the average CTV household has 3.3 members, and WPP Media estimates one ad impression reaches about 2.5 people on average, since 80%+ of CTV viewing happens with family or others in the room rather than one person alone. A number that big, self-reported by the platforms selling the inventory, deserves a little skepticism even when the underlying trend is real.

Why advertisers are buying it anyway

The report's engagement numbers are the part doing the actual selling. 83% of CTV viewers say they seek more information after seeing an ad, rising to 89% among premium audiences, a response rate linear TV was never able to prove because it had no way to trace a viewer's next move. The Trade Desk's Meeta Gupta frames the pitch accordingly: brands increasingly use CTV as a "base-builder for reach" inside a media plan, not a niche add-on. WPP Media's Rajiv Rajagopal said the format has already been activated across 30+ advertiser categories, from FMCG and auto to appliances and luxury.

Gen Z is the fastest-adopting cohort inside the data: 3.1 hours a day on CTV, 77% of it watched with family or friends, with cricket and web series tying at 64% as the top draw and 68% saying they prefer using an OTT app directly on the smart TV over casting from a phone.

Who actually owns this audience

The audience gains are concentrating on one platform. JioHotstar, formed when Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema merged under JioStar in 2025, has run the largest share of CTV ad inventory in the country by a wide margin through events like IPL 2026, and its bundled-telecom marketing strategy is a big reason competitors like Zee5 and SonyLIV, whose own merger attempt fell through, have struggled to keep pace. Amazon Prime Video and Netflix remain the other serious players fighting for the same living-room screen, among a wider field of OTT platforms all now competing for CTV inventory rather than just app downloads.

What to actually watch

The honest read on this report is that it's measuring two different things that happen to share a screen: how many Indians can watch internet video on a TV, and how many advertisers currently think that's worth paying for at scale. Those numbers are converging, not aligned yet. If CTV's ad-spend share keeps closing the gap toward its audience share over the next year, the panel-cost story becomes an advertising story too. If it doesn't, 207 million stays an impressive but under-monetized number, and the platforms with the cheapest reach right now, JioHotstar chief among them, are the ones best positioned to cash in once it does.

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