Indian brands are increasing ad spend across both TV and OTT/CTV in 2026 at once, not shifting from one to the other. The drivers are the same tentpole sports moments now being bought across both screens, addressable targeting that has made CTV a performance channel rather than just a reach channel, and measurement reforms that are rebuilding advertiser confidence in TV as a medium.
On the surface, this looks like a contradiction. Digital advertising already commands the majority share of India’s total ad spend, and linear TV viewership keeps eroding at a mid-single-digit pace year over year. Yet TV ad revenue is returning to growth in 2026, and OTT/CTV ad spend is climbing even faster. Both are rising together, and understanding why matters for how enterprise and regional marketers plan their next TVC and media mix.
This piece walks through the actual numbers behind the shift, the five forces driving it, which sectors are leading the increase, and what it means for how you plan and produce a campaign in 2026.
Total TV advertising revenue in India was projected to decline roughly 1.5% in 2025 to approximately ₹47,740 crore, before returning to modest growth in 2026, according to WPP Media’s This Year Next Year (TYNY) report. Linear viewership continues eroding at a mid-single-digit pace, but within the broader TV category, streaming and CTV are described as the clear bright spots.
CTV ad spend in India is projected in the ₹2,300–2,500 crore range for 2026, up from roughly ₹1,500 crore in 2024 and just ₹86 crore in 2023 — one of the steepest growth curves in the entire media mix. CTV household penetration is expected to reach 50–60 million by the end of 2026, growing at an estimated 20–35% year on year depending on the source.
OTT advertising revenue in India reached approximately ₹6,200 crore in 2026, a 27% year-on-year increase, driven by programmatic video, CTV growth, and premium live-sports inventory commanding CPMs of ₹250–400 — rates that now rival prime-time television. Ad-supported (AVOD) tiers accounted for roughly 48% of all new OTT platform subscriptions in 2026, up from just 22% a few years earlier, reflecting both platform strategy and consumer price sensitivity.
Digital advertising overall remains the largest slice of India’s ad pie, expected to capture roughly 60–64% of total AdEx in 2025–2026 and reach an estimated $14.56 billion in market size in 2026 — growing 10.1% year on year, per PayNXT360. Retail media is the single fastest-growing channel within that digital total, forecast to reach a 15% share of total ad revenue by 2026. The key nuance: digital’s share is largest in absolute terms, but the rate of growth in CTV and OTT specifically is outpacing flat-to-declining linear TV, which is the real story behind rising combined TV + OTT budgets.
Channel | 2025 | 2026 (Projected) | YoY Change |
Linear TV (total) | ~₹47,740 Cr (-1.5%) | Modest growth | Flat to declining |
CTV | ~₹1,500–2,000 Cr (est.) | ₹2,300–2,500 Cr | Sharp growth |
OTT Advertising | ~₹4,900 Cr (est.) | ₹6,200 Cr | +27% |
Digital (overall) | ~$13.2 Bn | ~$14.56 Bn | +10.1% |
The numbers above only tell you what’s happening. The more useful question for a marketer planning a 2026 budget is why — and the answer isn’t one factor, it’s five reinforcing ones.
Smart TV and CTV households have been growing at an estimated 20–35% year on year, with total streaming hours rising alongside them — some reports put average monthly OTT viewing on the big screen at close to 85 hours per household. CTV now delivers the kind of mass reach that TV was traditionally bought for, but with the addressable targeting that linear TV never had. For marketers, that means CTV is no longer a test-budget line item — it’s increasingly treated as core TV inventory.
Live sports, and the IPL in particular, remain the single biggest catalyst for combined TV and OTT spend. Brands increasingly buy the same tentpole moment across linear TV and CTV/OTT simultaneously — through platforms like JioHotstar and JioCinema — rather than choosing one over the other. Premium sports inventory on streaming now commands CPMs that rival prime-time television rates, which is what’s pulling large FMCG and automotive budgets into streaming without those brands cutting their existing TV spend.
Household-level addressability and AI-driven creative personalization are relatively new capabilities in the Indian CTV market, and they change the ROI conversation for enterprise marketers specifically. Instead of one national ad running on every screen, brands can now deploy multiple regional or language-specific creative variants against the same media buy — turning a reach channel into something closer to a performance channel, measurable in the same way as digital.
Rising internet penetration in Tier II and Tier III cities, combined with the growth of regional-language platforms such as ShareChat and Dailyhunt, is opening up audience segments that neither pure linear TV nor English-first digital platforms previously reached well. This regional expansion is a meaningful part of why overall ad spend — not just digital — is climbing: it’s genuinely new addressable audience, not budget reallocated from an existing channel.
India’s TV Rating Policy reforms in 2026 are aimed squarely at restoring advertiser trust in TV measurement, which had been strained by concerns over panel size and methodology at the country’s dominant ratings agency. The policy lowers the barrier for new ratings agencies to enter the market, requires panel expansion, and mandates greater governance and disclosure. Alongside this, cross-platform measurement initiatives — unifying TV and digital viewership data — are making it easier for marketers to justify TV and CTV spend with the same rigor they apply to digital. Better measurement doesn’t just help digital budgets; it’s directly rebuilding confidence in traditional TV spend too.
FMCG and e-commerce together account for roughly two-thirds of India’s total digital ad spend, and both categories are also among the heaviest spenders on premium CTV and sports inventory specifically. Automotive brands are close behind, particularly around tentpole live-sports moments where premium reach still matters most.
A notable pattern for enterprise and regional marketers: D2C and digitally-native brands that built their early growth purely on performance digital are increasingly treating CTV as a graduation channel — the next step once they need brand-building reach on top of the performance marketing they already run. That shift is part of why CTV budgets are growing faster than the overall ad market.
Two practical implications follow directly from this data.
On budget planning: if you’re buying into a tentpole sports or entertainment moment, plan creative that’s built to work natively across both linear TV and CTV formats from the outset, rather than shooting a single TVC and reusing an unmodified cutdown across every screen. The audiences, and increasingly the targeting capability, are different enough on each that a one-size-fits-all cut leaves performance on the table.
On production planning: addressable and regional CTV inventory increasingly calls for multiple creative variants — by language, by region, and by duration — rather than one master film. This has direct implications for how you brief a production house; see our brief template if you haven’t already built variant requirements into your process. It’s also worth revisiting what a TVC actually costs under this shifting channel mix, since multi-variant production changes the cost structure from what a single-cut TVC used to require.
As more campaigns are bought across linear TV and CTV/OTT simultaneously, production increasingly needs to account for both from a single shoot — different aspect ratios, durations, and sometimes regional language variants — rather than treating broadcast and streaming as separate production jobs with separate budgets. Filmgoi builds TVC production around this reality, so one shoot can deliver what both distribution channels actually need.
TV and OTT ad spend in India are rising together because brands are increasingly buying them as one connected strategy — the same tentpole moment, the same audience, split across two screens with different strengths. For enterprise and regional marketers, that means production planning needs to account for both from day one, not as an afterthought.
If you’re planning a campaign against this shifting mix, start with a clear brief — our free TVC brief template covers exactly the deliverables and format questions this shift raises — and see our 2026 pricing guide to understand how multi-format production affects your budget.
