Industry Odisha Bureau, Sep 08: India’s OTT audience reached 664.9 million in 2026. That marks 11% growth year-on-year. Connected-TV audiences, meanwhile, surged 60% over the same period.
The connected-TV base now stands at 206.9 million. Digital video consumption is turning increasingly multi-screen. Smartphones and television sets are both gaining ground. These figures come from the Ormax OTT Audience Report 2026. Ormax surveyed 15,000 respondents across urban and rural India. Fieldwork ran through June and July this year.
The report estimates 45% of India’s population watches online video. That reach spans free and paid content alike. Not every viewer, though, holds an active subscription. Active paid OTT subscriptions reached 172.6 million, up 16%. Ormax defines these as subscriptions used within the past month. That includes access through telecom bundles and aggregators.
An OTT audience member, by contrast, needs only one viewed video. The content can be free or paid. This distinction separates casual viewers from paying users. Connected TV remains this year’s standout structural shift. Its 60% growth outpaced overall OTT expansion sharply. Large screens are becoming a bigger part of digital video.
That does not mean smartphones are losing relevance. Mobile viewing continues alongside this larger-screen expansion. India is moving toward parallel viewing environments instead. Viewing intensity overall remains substantial. OTT users average 14.9 hours weekly watching online video. Annual consumption is estimated near 517 billion hours.
That viewing spans traditional platforms, social media and newer formats. Micro-dramas, K-dramas and FAST channels all contribute. Content preferences are shifting alongside screen habits. Micro-drama audiences grew fastest, up 50% year-on-year. K-dramas followed closely with 48% audience growth. Anime rounded out the fastest-growing formats, up 32%.
These figures track audience growth, not market share. A fast-growing format need not dominate overall viewing. FAST channels, still emerging, reached about 35.2 million viewers. Audio streaming offers adjacent context for India’s digital habits. The country counts 227.3 million monthly active audio streamers. Roughly 15 million of them pay for the service.
Geographic reach is widening alongside these behavioural shifts. Forty-four Indian cities now have OTT audiences above one million. Digital video consumption is no longer concentrated narrowly. Ormax Media founder Shailesh Kapoor described the resulting shift. He called it a move toward a “two-screen ecosystem.” Audience behaviour, he said, is becoming more layered.
That layering carries real weight for India’s media industry. Platforms must now plan for viewers across two screens. Connected TV’s rapid rise is reshaping how that audience gets served.
