India’s OTT audience rises 11% to 665 million; connected TV base surges 60%: Ormax

India’s OTT audience grew 11% year-on-year to 664.9 million in 2026, while the country’s active paid OTT subscriptions increased 16% to 172.6 million, according to the latest annual report by media consulting firm Ormax Media.

The Ormax OTT Audience Report: 2026, based on a survey of 15,000 respondents across urban and rural India conducted in June and July, estimates that 45% of India’s population now watches online video.

The sharper shift, however, is taking place on connected televisions. India’s active connected-TV audience reached 206.9 million, up 60% from 2025, pointing to the growing importance of large-screen viewing alongside smartphones.


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Ormax defines an OTT audience as anyone who watched at least one online video, free or paid, in the preceding month. Active paid subscriptions are those used at least once during the month and include subscriptions obtained through telecom bundles and OTT aggregators.

OTT users in India now spend an average 14.9 hours a week watching online video, including content on social media, micro-drama platforms and FAST channels. That translates into an estimated 517 billion hours of annual video consumption.

The report also highlights changing content preferences. Micro-dramas recorded 50% growth in audience size, followed by K-dramas at 48% and anime at 32%, making them the fastest-growing formats in the market.

FAST channels, meanwhile, are beginning to establish an audience in India, with an estimated 35.2 million viewers.

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Audio streaming remains a substantial adjacent market, with 227.3 million monthly active audio streamers, of whom 15 million pay for audio streaming services.

The OTT audience is also becoming increasingly distributed geographically. Forty-four Indian cities now have an OTT audience of at least one million, according to the report.

Ormax Media founder and CEO Shailesh Kapoor said the rapid rise of connected TV is reshaping India from a predominantly smartphone-led digital video market into a “two-screen ecosystem”, making audience behaviour more layered.