OTT Advertising in India: Reaching Audiences Beyond TV

Industry & Competitive Context

India's over-the-top (OTT) streaming sector has emerged as one of the fastest-growing media markets in the world, undergoing a structural transformation that has fundamentally disrupted the country's advertising economy. According to data published by the FICCI-EY Media & Entertainment Report 2025, digital media overtook television in 2024 to become the largest segment within India's overall media and entertainment sector, contributing 32% of total revenues — a historic milestone that had been anticipated for years but arrived with unusual speed.

The scale of the OTT audience in India is staggering. India's OTT viewership — defined as individuals who watched online video at least once in the prior month — reached 601.2 million in 2025, representing a 9.9% year-on-year increase and 41% penetration of the total population, according to data from Media Partners Asia. Total combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions across OTT platforms in India reached ₹37,940 crore in FY 2024-25, according to data sourced by Exchange4media from Chrome DM, of which advertising alone accounted for ₹23,340 crore. The advertising-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) model is the dominant force in this ecosystem, accounting for approximately 78% of total OTT revenue in India as reported by COTT (Collective OTT Tracker).

The competitive landscape is highly concentrated. YouTube leads the Indian OTT market by a wide margin, generating ₹14,300 crore in advertising and subscription revenue in FY 2024-25, capturing a 37.7% share of total digital media revenue, driven by its vast creator economy, regional language depth, and rural-urban penetration. The second-most consequential development of 2025 has been the creation of JioHotstar — the entity formed from the merger of JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar — which entered the market commanding an estimated 31% SVOD market share, according to JustWatch Q4 2024 data. Netflix held 16% market share by end-2024, while Amazon MX Player — itself formed by the merger of Amazon miniTV and MX Player — generated ₹1,200 crore in revenue and reached over 250 million unique users by September 2024. SonyLIV, ZEE5, and regional platforms such as Stage and Aha Video occupy the long tail of the ecosystem.

The platform architecture of this market is important to understand strategically. OTT in India is not a monolithic medium — it spans mobile-first, ad-supported platforms serving Tier-2 and Tier-3 audiences; premium subscription services targeting urban, high-income consumers; and connected television (CTV), which grew from 23 million weekly active units in 2023 to 30 million in 2024, as documented in the FICCI-EY 2025 report.

The Structural Decline of Linear Television

For two consecutive years, India's linear television sector has contracted. According to the FICCI-EY report, TV segment revenues declined 4.5% in 2024, following a 2% fall in 2023. Television advertising revenue dropped 6%, driven by a comparable reduction in advertising volumes and a 12% decline in the number of brands using television as an advertising medium. Pay TV households fell by six million, settling at 111 million total subscribers.

This structural decline has not been driven by falling viewership alone — it has been driven by the migration of premium sports content, which historically anchored television's value for advertisers. The FICCI-EY 2025 report directly attributes a 27% decline in sports viewership on linear TV to the shift of live cricket to free OTT streaming, the growth of CTV, and the absence of one ICC tournament compared to the prior year. When a medium loses its premium sports inventory to digital competitors, the advertising revenue rotation that follows is both rapid and secular.

The implications for brand allocations were material and measurable. Twelve percent of brands exited television as an advertising medium in 2024. CTV, which accounted for 29% of total TV ad spend in 2024, is projected to reach 42% by 2027, according to The Current. The advertiser base that once built reach strategies around the television set is now constructing those strategies around OTT platforms and connected screens.

The Strategic Inflection Point: IPL Goes Free on OTT

The most significant catalyst for OTT advertising's acceleration in India was Viacom18's decision to stream the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2023 free of cost on JioCinema. This single strategic move — enabled by Viacom18 securing the digital rights for IPL through 2027 — restructured the economics of digital advertising in India in ways that are now documented across multiple industry reports.

JioCinema clocked a reach of 450 million viewers during IPL 2023. The platform attracted 195 advertisers during that season, representing 319 brands, according to a TAM Adex report. Of those 195 advertisers, 153 were digital-exclusive — meaning they were not present on television — demonstrating that OTT was unlocking advertiser categories that had never engaged with broadcast media. The advertiser universe spanned 124 categories, with the heaviest CTV categories being automotive (four-wheelers), air conditioners, BFSI, and fashion brands — all high-consideration, high-ticket product segments whose buyers map directly onto the premium connected TV viewer profile.

In absolute terms, JioCinema's digital ad revenues for IPL 2023 surpassed those of linear television for the same property. This was not a close result — it was the first time in the history of cricket broadcasting in India that a digital platform outperformed the traditional broadcaster in advertising revenue for the same marquee property, a fact explicitly noted in Viacom18's communications ahead of the 2024 season. For IPL 2024, JioCinema targeted a reach exceeding 650 million and announced a portfolio of new advertiser-facing innovations, including WhatsApp retargeting during live streams, auto-fill mid-roll formats for lead generation, and CTV-specific targeting solutions for the over 28 million connected TV households in India.

Strategic Objective and Positioning of OTT as an Advertising Medium

The strategic narrative that OTT platforms and their media agencies have constructed for advertisers in India rests on three verifiable claims: scale comparable to television, targeting precision superior to any analog medium, and measurement accountability that broadcast cannot offer.

Scale is demonstrated by raw numbers that are now public. The ICC Champions Trophy 2025 India-Pakistan match drew over 600 million viewers on JioHotstar alone, as reported by industry coverage. These are not household numbers — they are individual viewer counts, which makes the advertising efficiency comparison with television even more unfavorable to linear TV, since television measurements have historically relied on household-level ratings.

Targeting precision is the more strategically significant differentiator. OTT platforms in India have built advertising products around first-party audience data collected from authenticated, logged-in users. JioCinema's advertiser offerings — documented in its official press communications — include geographic targeting, language-based segmentation, device-type separation (enabling brands to reach CTV premium audiences separately from mobile audiences), and demographic cohort targeting. The platform's integration with Jio's telecom data infrastructure provides an additional layer of behavioral signal that broadcast television cannot replicate. During IPL 2024, CTV-only and CTV-heavy advertiser categories included automobiles, air conditioners, BFSI, and fashion — categories that require precise audience qualification rather than mass reach.

Programmatic buying is maturing rapidly in the Indian OTT ecosystem. Platforms including ZEE5 and ShemarooMe have integrated with programmatic supply-side platforms (SSPs), making inventory accessible through demand-side platforms (DSPs) such as Google DV360 and The Trade Desk, the latter of which has made CTV-specific buying with frequency control and reach forecasting available in the Indian market.

Media & Channel Strategy Across the OTT Ecosystem

Brands operating in India's OTT advertising landscape have effectively been forced to develop a multi-tier media strategy that did not exist five years ago. The ecosystem today comprises at least three distinct advertising environments: mobile OTT (mass market, high reach, price-sensitive), CTV/premium OTT (urban, high-income, long-form engaged), and sports live-streaming (event-driven, cross-demographic, high emotional engagement).

For categories seeking mass reach — FMCG, e-commerce, fintech, telecom — the mobile OTT environment, led by YouTube and Amazon MX Player, offers a cost-efficient alternative to television with addressable targeting. Amazon MX Player's ad-supported model reached over 250 million unique users by September 2024, offering content in local languages and serving a distinctly different demographic than premium subscription platforms.

For luxury, automotive, and financial services categories, the CTV environment — where 30 million weekly active screens were counted in 2024 by FICCI-EY — provides a high-attention, unskippable advertising format on the largest screen in the household. TAM Adex data from IPL 2023 shows that automotive (four-wheelers) and air conditioners were the heaviest-spending CTV-exclusive categories on JioCinema, which is consistent with the income profile of households that own both a connected television and an automobile.

For sports marketing specifically, the live-streaming environment has become the primary arena. JioCinema reported 50% more watch time per match during IPL 2023 compared to 2022, a metric that carries direct implications for ad recall and brand engagement, and was cited in communications ahead of the 2024 season.

Market Structure and Consolidation Dynamics

India's OTT advertising market is undergoing rapid consolidation that will have long-term implications for advertiser leverage and pricing. The JioCinema-Disney+ Hotstar merger into JioHotstar in early 2025 created a platform with a combined user base exceeding 500 million users and a content library of approximately 300,000 hours of programming streaming in 19 languages, as reported by The Media Ant. The merged entity now commands sports rights that include ICC events, IPL through 2027, the Premier League, Wimbledon, the Women's Premier League, and Pro Kabaddi — a rights portfolio with no equivalent in Indian digital media.

This consolidation mirrors a pattern observed globally: as OTT matures, inventory concentrates in fewer hands, which increases platform pricing power relative to advertisers. Industry experts quoted in Afaqs following the merger noted that JioHotstar's parent entity Network18 had already increased advertising rates for television feeds, signaling a broader monetization push across screens. The platform has adopted a hybrid AVOD/SVOD model, with AVOD serving the advertising market and SVOD capturing the premium subscription segment — a structure that maximizes both reach and revenue yield.

The competitive response from remaining platforms has been visible. ZEE5 and SonyLIV, which generated ₹1,037 crore and ₹1,129 crore respectively in FY 2024-25, face significant structural pressure. Netflix, which has historically been a subscription-only platform, has begun expanding its advertising tier in international markets, though no verified public information is available on the formal launch status of its ad-supported tier in India as of the knowledge available.

Business & Brand Outcomes

The documented outcomes from OTT advertising in India are measurable at both the market level and the platform-event level.

At the market level, total OTT advertising revenue in India reached ₹23,340 crore in FY 2024-25, representing a commanding share of total digital advertising in the country. The FICCI-EY 2025 report documents that digital media advertising grew 8.1% in 2024, even as television advertising fell 6%. This divergence between digital growth and television contraction in a single calendar year confirms that the advertising budget shift is not cyclical but structural.

At the event level, the 2023 IPL on JioCinema attracted 25 sponsors — versus 13 sponsors that Disney+ Hotstar had attracted for IPL 2022 on television — representing a near-doubling of sponsor count, as documented by Inc42 and TAM Adex. Dream11 joined as co-presenting sponsor, with JioMart, PhonePe, and Tata Tiago as co-powered sponsors, and new-age digital brands including Rapido, Amazon, and Spotify also advertising on the platform. This sponsor mix — heavily weighted toward digital-native and new-economy brands — illustrates the degree to which OTT advertising has become a primary customer acquisition channel for growth-stage companies that do not have the budget for broadcast television sponsorships but can access comparable reach at lower minimum commitment thresholds.

CTV advertising during IPL 2023 accumulated 2,82,044 seconds of total ad volume, while mobile accumulated 12,49,660 seconds, according to TAM Adex. The asymmetry reflects the fact that mobile remains the primary OTT screen by volume in India, but CTV commands a disproportionate share of premium advertiser interest due to the audience demographics it delivers.

Strategic Implications

India's OTT advertising shift presents several strategic implications that are analytically distinct from what the raw market size numbers suggest.

First, the addressability advantage of OTT is more durable than that of any previous digital advertising medium because it operates on authenticated, logged-in user data rather than cookie-based behavioral inference. As third-party cookies are deprecated globally and privacy regulation tightens, OTT platforms sitting on first-party telecom and content consumption data — particularly those integrated with Jio's subscriber base — hold a structural advantage that will compound over time.

Second, the free-streaming model deployed by JioCinema for IPL 2023 was not simply a user acquisition strategy — it was an advertiser acquisition strategy. By democratizing access to premium live cricket, the platform expanded the advertising market itself, drawing in 153 digital-exclusive advertisers who had no prior relationship with broadcast media. This is a form of two-sided market construction that few platforms have executed as directly in emerging markets.

Third, the JioHotstar merger raises genuine questions about market concentration and advertiser leverage. With one platform controlling the digital rights to India's most-watched sporting events, and with YouTube commanding 37.7% of total OTT revenue on the content side, the effective duopoly at the top of India's OTT advertising market may exert pricing pressure on advertisers in ways not yet fully reflected in published data. No verified public information is available on the specific advertising rate structures post-merger or the degree to which advertiser CPMs have shifted since February 2025.

Fourth, the regional language content dimension is a strategic imperative that is becoming a market access condition rather than a differentiator. More than 50% of all streaming content consumed in India is in regional languages, as reported by Kotak Neo citing industry sources. Advertisers who build only Hindi or English creative assets for OTT will structurally underserve the audience that OTT's scale promises — and the platforms are already building the infrastructure for language-targeted ad delivery at scale.

Fifth, the convergence of AVOD and subscription models across platforms is creating measurement complexity that the industry has not yet resolved. No verified public information is available on a standardized cross-platform audience measurement methodology equivalent to BARC (Broadcast Audience Research Council) for television, though FICCI-EY has noted the need for such a framework in its 2025 report. Until cross-platform measurement is standardized, advertisers face a planning gap between reach claims and independently verified outcomes.

Discussion Questions

1. JioCinema's decision to stream IPL 2023 free of cost dramatically increased both viewership and advertiser participation. Using the two-sided market framework, analyze how this pricing strategy created value for advertisers differently than it did for users — and what the long-term monetization risks of this model are for the platform.

2. The FICCI-EY 2025 report documents a 12% decline in the number of brands using television as an advertising medium in 2024. Using the media substitution framework, distinguish between budget reallocation toward OTT (substitution) and incremental OTT spend that does not come at television's expense (market expansion). What evidence in this case supports each interpretation?

3. The JioHotstar merger has created a platform with combined cricket rights, a 500-million-plus user base, and Jio's telecom data infrastructure. Apply the theory of competitive advantage to assess whether this constitutes a durable moat — and identify the specific conditions under which Netflix or Amazon Prime Video could meaningfully compete for premium advertising spend.

4. India's OTT advertising ecosystem shows a clear divergence between CTV-heavy advertiser categories (automotive, BFSI, air conditioners) and mobile-heavy categories (fantasy gaming, e-commerce, beverages). What does this segmentation reveal about the nature of advertising effectiveness on each screen — and how should a brand straddling both markets structure its OTT investment allocation?

5. No verified cross-platform audience measurement standard exists in India's OTT sector equivalent to what BARC provides for television. As a CMO of a major FMCG company allocating ₹500 crore in annual advertising, how would the absence of standardized measurement affect your OTT investment strategy — and what governance frameworks would you demand from platforms before committing to large-scale OTT spend?