Rs 8,000 Crore CTV Market: Is the Money Following the Eyeballs Yet?

Rs 8,000 crore. That’s where India’s connected TV market stands today, growing at a reported 25 to 40 percent a year depending on which estimate you trust. Set that beside another number: CTV now accounts for a share of long-form video viewership in urban India that rivals, and by some counts exceeds, what many premium linear channels individually command. Two numbers, moving in the same direction, telling two different stories — one about where audiences have gone, and one about how much marketing money has actually followed them there. The gap between those stories is where this piece lives.

CTV inventory in India today spans premium OTT originals, free ad-supported channels bundled into smart TV interfaces, YouTube on the big screen — which by some counts now accounts for the single largest share of connected television viewing in the country — and a growing tail of niche streaming apps. That inventory is being consumed by exactly the demographic brands have spent a decade trying to pry away from linear: urban, digitally native, increasingly cord-cutting households who want long-form content but won’t sit through the same ad pod six times an hour. And yet, when the annual media plan gets built, television budgets still overwhelmingly default to linear GRPs, with CTV treated as a supplementary line rather than a core allocation.

“We know our audience is there. What we don’t have yet is a number we can defend internally the way we can defend a GRP.”

That sentence, heard in some form from category heads across nearly every major Indian advertiser, captures the gap between eyeballs and money more precisely than any market-sizing report has managed to.

One currency vs. four definitions of a “view”

Linear television in India has BARC — imperfect, frequently contested, but singular, and universally accepted as the currency everyone plans against. CTV has no equivalent. A brand running a campaign across three streaming platforms and YouTube CTV is working with four different definitions of what counts as a view, four different fraud and viewability standards, and no reliable way to calculate overlap between those audiences.

This is not a small technical footnote. It’s arguably the single biggest reason large FMCG and auto advertisers — the categories that historically anchor television spend in India — have moved more cautiously into CTV than viewership numbers alone would suggest they should. These categories plan budgets using metrics that are standardised, auditable, and comparable year over year. CTV currently asks marketers to plan with numbers that are directionally useful but not yet boardroom-defensible in the way BARC data is.

Until measurement standardises industry-wide, a meaningful share of Indian ad spend will keep hesitating at the CTV door — even as viewership keeps making the case for walking through it.

Fragmentation is repeating an old pattern

There’s a second dynamic slowing budget migration, and it echoes something the Indian digital ecosystem has lived through before. CTV inventory is split across premium streamers with subscription-plus-ads models, ad-supported free platforms, smart TV operating system inventory sold directly by device manufacturers, and YouTube’s own CTV surface, which runs on an entirely different sales logic. Buying meaningful reach across that landscape currently means either a patchwork of direct platform relationships, each with its own minimum spend and negotiation cycle, or a programmatic buy through a CTV-focused DSP that may not reach every premium inventory pool.

For a large advertiser with the resourcing to manage several vendor relationships at once, that’s an annoyance. For the mid-sized D2C and challenger brands that were among the fastest adopters of digital-first media, it’s a real deterrent — the same brands that moved decisively when Meta and Google consolidated performance marketing into self-serve, real-time platforms are now facing a CTV buying process that looks more like traditional television: relationship-driven, negotiation-heavy, comparatively slow.

Where the money is moving first

CTV spend isn’t stagnant — it’s simply concentrating in the categories where the format’s advantages are least ambiguous. Auto launches, where cinematic long-form creative to a targeted urban audience justifies both the premium and the planning complexity, have been early and consistent adopters. Streaming and entertainment brands buy CTV inventory to promote other CTV content, a somewhat closed loop that inflates apparent category adoption. And performance-driven D2C brands with sophisticated in-house data teams have begun treating CTV as a genuinely addressable, retargetable channel — running sequential messaging that follows a user from a mobile app abandonment straight into a CTV ad in the same household, a capability linear television never offered.

The large, traditional FMCG budget — the one category that could single-handedly close the gap between viewership share and spend share — remains the slowest to move.

That caution isn’t irrational. FMCG media planning in India runs at a scale where a measurement gap of this kind isn’t a minor inconvenience — it’s a genuine risk to how marketing effectiveness gets reported up the chain. Until CTV measurement plugs into existing marketing mix modelling with the same confidence BARC data does, expect this category to keep testing steadily rather than reallocating decisively.

Three things that close the gap

The Rs 8,000 crore figure will keep climbing regardless — the viewership trend underneath it is too structural to reverse. The real question is whether CTV grows into a proportionate share of India’s overall video budget, or stays in its own smaller, semi-separate lane. Closing that gap likely needs three things moving together: a credible, industry-accepted measurement standard built through collaboration between platforms, agencies, and advertisers rather than any single vendor’s proprietary black box; meaningful consolidation on the buying side, so a mid-sized brand can access premium CTV inventory without a dozen separate vendor relationships; and a slower, organisational shift — media teams built their KPIs and reporting structures around linear GRPs over decades, and rewiring that will take deliberate change, not just better data.

None of that happens quickly. But the direction of travel isn’t really in question — India’s living rooms have already made their choice, migrating to connected screens faster than almost anyone predicted three years ago. The money will follow, because it eventually always follows attention at this scale. The more useful question for anyone planning a media budget over the next few cycles isn’t whether that shift happens, but whether their own organisation is building the measurement literacy and buying infrastructure to move with it — or whether they’ll still be running the same cautious pilots in 2028, waiting for a certainty that linear television never actually had to offer either.