By Shailesh Kapoor
Copyright mxmindia
Over the last two years, India’s Connected TV (CTV) market has moved from buzz to boom. Once a niche device for affluent metro households (until as recently as 2023), CTV has come into its own. The Ormax OTT Audience Report: 2025 estimates the CTV universe at 129.2 million individuals (35-40 million households), up from 69.7 million in 2024 – an extraordinary 85% jump in a single year.
But the CTV story is about more than headline numbers. It marks India’s fundamental shift from a one-device market to a two-device market. Today, 98% of India’s 601 million OTT viewers watch videos on their smartphones. Laptops and tablets remain fringe devices; in a market dominated by blue-collar users, they were never likely to rival the phone.
Enter the household screen: the familiar television, only smarter. CTV has now reached critical mass. Even at a conservative 30-40% annual growth, India would surpass 230 million CTV viewers by 2027. That’s more than four times the UK’s population, and nearly double India’s annual theatre-going audience.
Put simply, India is no longer a smartphone-only market. It is a “Smartphone + CTV” market. The smartphone base is still far larger, but engagement and monetization data consistently show that a CTV viewer’s lifetime value is higher, making this fast-expanding segment the real engine of India’s OTT future.
This device shift also reshapes content consumption. Vertical formats (Reels, YouTube Shorts, micro-dramas, etc.) will keep thriving on smartphones. But CTV is poised to power long-form viewing, both free and paid.
For linear television, the implications are serious. Traditional TV’s key advantage has been its family-first experience. With the right content offerings, CTV allows streaming platforms to now replicate, and arguably enhance, that shared-screen habit, something the smartphone alone could never do. Sports is the low-hanging fruit. But it’s a matter of time that dramas will also follow suit, if our OTT platforms can offer more family-inclusive content than they have been doing thus far.
Much has been written about the pandemic as OTT’s great accelerator. CTV may prove an even bigger catalyst. Not only in audience growth, but in how advertising money shifts over the next few years.
