India’s OTT audience has surged to nearly 665 million users, or 45 percent of the population, with paid subscriptions climbing 16 percent to 172.6 million, according to Ormax Media’s 2026 report. Connected TV users jumped 60 percent to 206.9 million, underscoring a shift from a smartphone-led market to a complex, multi-screen streaming ecosystem.
India's online video audience has crossed the 665 million mark, according to Ormax Media's sixth annual OTT Audience Report, a study the Mumbai-based research firm has positioned as the industry's key benchmark for tracking how the country watches streaming content.
The 2026 edition, based on interviews with 15,000 respondents across urban and rural India in June and July, paints a picture of a market that is not just growing but changing shape increasingly split across screens, formats and content categories.
The report's top-line numbers hihlight that India's OTT universe now stands at 664.9 million (66.49 crore) people, which represents 45 percent of the population, up 11% from 601.2 million in 2025.
The report defines an OTT audience as anyone who watched at least one online video (free or paid) during the past month and breaks down this universe by gender, age, media affluence, pop strata, states, and cities.
Active paid subscriptions, defined as used at least once in the past month, including those bundled through telecom plans and OTT aggregators, rose 16 percent year-over-year to 172.6 million.
The report pegs India’s active Connected TV user base at 206.9 million, which reflects a staggering growth of 60 percent over 2025.
Beyond the headline figures, the report maps a country watching more, in more places. Some 44 Indian cities now have OTT audiences of at least 1 million. The average Indian OTT viewer spends 14.9 hours a week watching video across streaming, social platforms, micro-dramas and FAST channels, adding up to an estimated 517 billion hours of annual watch time nationally. And India's monthly audio streaming base stands at 227.3 million, of which 15 million pay for the service.
On the content side, micro-dramas, K-dramas and anime emerged as the fastest-growing categories, posting audience growth of 50 percent, 48 percent and 32 percent respectively.
Ormax Media founder and CEO Shailesh Kapoor said the report, now in its sixth year, has become a benchmark data source for the streaming industry, noting that the rise of Connected TV is making audience behavior more layered as India shifts toward multi-screen viewing.
"The rapid rise of CTV is now reshaping India from a predominantly smartphone-led digital video market into a two-screen ecosystem, making audience behaviour more layered and complex, which makes this report more relevant than ever before," Kapoor said.
Keerat Grewal, the company's head of business development for streaming, TV and brands, said the 2026 edition adds new sections tracking FAST channel consumption and e-commerce behavior across a dozen app categories.
"These additions broaden the report beyond content and platform usage, offering a richer view of the digital consumer and creating new opportunities to connect audience behaviour with business and monetisation outcomes," Grewal added.