India’s streaming market has crossed another milestone. The Ormax OTT Audience Report: 2026, released by media consulting firm Ormax Media, puts the country’s OTT audience at 664.9 million — roughly 45% of the population — and active paid subscriptions at 172.6 million.
The sixth edition of the annual study is based on a sample of 15,000 respondents across urban and rural India, surveyed in June and July 2026. Ormax counts anyone who watched at least one online video, free or paid, in the previous month as part of the OTT audience.
The headline numbers
- 664.9 million OTT audience, up 11% from 601.2 million in 2025
- 172.6 million active paid subscriptions, up 16% from 148.2 million (includes telecom bundles and OTT aggregators)
- 206.9 million active Connected TV users, a 60% jump over 2025
- 44 cities now have an OTT audience of at least one million
- 14.9 hours a week is the average time spent on OTT video, adding up to an estimated 517 billion hours a year
- 227.3 million monthly active audio streamers, of whom 15 million pay
- 35.2 million estimated audience for FAST channels
The big shift: from one screen to two
The most consequential number here is CTV. A 60% year-on-year jump to 206.9 million users signals that India is no longer a purely smartphone-first video market.
Ormax Founder & CEO Shailesh Kapoor said the rise of CTV is reshaping India into a “two-screen ecosystem”, making audience behaviour more layered — and, in his framing, making independent audience data more relevant than before.
For marketers, the two-screen reality changes several assumptions at once. Creative built for a muted, thumb-scrolled vertical feed does not translate to a living-room screen with sound on and multiple viewers. Frequency capping across devices becomes harder. And attribution gets messier, because the big screen drives discovery while the phone captures the click.
Where the growth is coming from
Content formats are shifting too. According to the report, micro dramas grew 50%, K-dramas 48% and anime 32% — the fastest-growing categories in the study. That is a young, snackable, largely non-Bollywood consumption pattern, and it sits alongside the steady rise of ad-supported FAST channels.
The spread of the audience matters as much as its size. With 44 cities crossing a million OTT viewers, streaming inventory is no longer a metro-only proposition — which has implications for regional language creative and for brands that have historically treated OTT as a premium urban buy.
What the 2026 edition adds
Ormax has widened the scope this year. Keerat Grewal, Head of Business Development (Streaming, TV & Brands) at Ormax Media, said the edition includes a CTV deep-dive plus new sections on FAST channel consumption and e-commerce behaviour across 12 app categories and nine shopping sub-categories.
That last addition is the interesting one for performance marketers: linking viewing behaviour to shopping behaviour is exactly the bridge that CTV monetisation in India has been missing. The full report is available on subscription to platforms, advertisers, media agencies, investors and production houses.
What marketers should do next
A few practical takeaways from the data:
- Re-cut creative for CTV. Sound-on, lean-back, co-viewing. Do not just upload the 6-second vertical.
- Test FAST inventory early. At 35.2 million, it is small but growing, and pricing is typically friendlier than premium AVOD.
- Look at micro dramas seriously. A 50% growth rate suggests an emerging integration and branded-content opportunity.
- Don’t ignore audio. 227.3 million monthly streamers is a large, under-bought attention pool with only 15 million paying — meaning most of it is ad-supported.
The broader signal: India’s digital video market is maturing from reach-building into a segmented, format-diverse ecosystem. Planning it as a single line item on a media plan is getting harder to justify.
Source: MediaNews4U
