In most global media markets today, the story of television is written in the past tense. Cord-cutting, shrinking linear audiences, and advertisers shifting budgets to performance-driven digital platforms have become familiar headlines across the US and Europe. Yet, against this global retreat, India is moving in quite an opposite direction. Even as mobile screens multiply and streaming platforms race to capture attention, television here continues to grow, commercially, culturally, and in terms of daily relevance.
According to PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2025–29, India’s traditional media market is projected to grow at a 5.5 per cent CAGR, far outpacing the global average of just 0.4 per cent, with television alone expanding from USD 14 billion in 2024 to over USD 18 billion by 2029. It is a divergence that immediately raises a deeper question: why, in a country racing ahead in digital adoption, does the oldest screen in the house still command so much attention and hence traps advertiser confidence?
Well, part of the answer lies in how television is woven into everyday domestic life, especially for categories where purchase decisions are taken collectively. Virat Khullar, AVP and Vertical Head – Marketing at Hyundai Motor India, explains, “TV remains a medium of trust, shared viewing and cultural impact at scale, especially for high-involvement categories like automobiles, where decisions are driven by families, finances and emotions. At Hyundai, television continues to sit at the centre of our media strategy, CTV for data-led engagement, while Linear TV remains critical for mass reach.” He adds that television still commands around 30–35 per cent of their overall investment.
But, let’s be honest, TV advertising is not without its pressures. Audiences are fragmenting, younger viewers are moving to streaming, costs remain high excluding smaller brands from the medium, and ultimately digital offers sharper measurement and optimisation. The recent BARC ratings blackout, for instance, has added a big complication, leaving advertisers without fresh weekly audience data since July.
For Paritosh Joshi, Media & Broadcast Advisory Expert, the current challenge for television is not the medium itself, “The problem is not whether the medium has suddenly changed,” he says. But without an accurate and trustworthy way of measuring audiences, planners and buyers are left questioning whether they are receiving fair value for their investments.
For decades, media buying has been rooted in what Joshi calls ‘evidence-based marketing’, where advertising decisions are supported by measurable performance. “The absence of a measurement makes a very grievous impact on media buying as it becomes a purchase based entirely on faith and not evidence,” he explains.
The longer this continues, Joshi believes, the greater the risk, the higher the chances of uncertainty turning into reluctance to invest. “It creates room for doubt. The room for doubt eventually expands into a room for ignoring,” he says. Restoring reliable measurement, then, is not just about bringing back a ratings number. It is about giving advertisers and planners the evidence they need to justify television as a media investment.
The case for television, however, extends beyond the question of measurement. Ashish Sehgal, CEO, Times TV Network argues, “TV as a screen is not losing relevance - the way audiences consume it is evolving.” Traditional distribution models such as DTH may be under pressure, but television continues to command significant attention through live news, sports, premium content and shared viewing experiences. For advertisers, that means the screen still offers something that goes beyond simply delivering impressions: scale, sustained attention and the ability to bring audiences together around moments and content.
That broader reach becomes even more relevant when one looks beyond metros and into the linguistic and geographic breadth of the country, where television remains the most stable bridge between brands and households. While digital platforms have expanded access to content, total online reach still trails television by a wide margin, particularly outside urban centres.
Rahul Bhuraria, Senior Vice President – Technology (Data Preparation), Nielsen mentions that data from EY reports of 2024 indicated that TV continues to reach over 750 million viewers, compared to about 520 million online video consumers, keeping it commercially attractive for mass brands. Online reach is about 70 per cent of TV reach. He points out, while linear TV faces distribution pressures, “Total TV reach and viewing scale remain very large, which keeps TV commercially attractive for mass brands. Cultural habits like shared viewing, strong regional language consumption, and the role of TV in daily routines keep these platforms commercially relevant, especially outside the top metros.”
At the same time, the rise of connected TV is changing how audiences access television. TRAI’s latest performance report shows that the pay DTH subscriber base fell from 49.09 million in March 2026 to 48.56 million in June, a decline of 1.1% in a quarter. While traditional distribution faces pressure, this does not necessarily signal a decline in television itself, but points to changing viewing habits and access platforms. The medium may be evolving technologically, but its role as a household anchor remains intact. Not a collapse of television, he suggests, but a gradual shift in how it is accessed. In other words, the medium is evolving technologically, but its cultural function as a household anchor remains intact.
This structural foundation is reinforced by how television fits into India’s economic realities. Sandeep Gupta, Chief Operating Officer – Broadcasting Business, Shemaroo Entertainment, explains that television’s persistence is not driven by nostalgia but by practicality. In joint and multi-generational households, it remains the one shared screen that works instantly for all age groups. While new media replaced old habits in many markets, in India, new screens simply joined the room, allowing TV to retain its primetime role.
However, he adds, “Affordability is another key structural pillar behind this resilience, free platforms with no recurring subscription cost like DD Free Dish today offer more than 130 free-to-air channels across private broadcasters and Doordarshan.” According to the latest TRAI report, India had 906 satellite TV channels available for viewing, of which 342 were pay channels and 566 were free-to-air. This has created a truly free mass entertainment platform at national scale, he nortes. Something that has few parallels globally. For millions of households outside metro markets, television therefore remains not just accessible, but indispensable. Even younger audiences, he notes, continue to return to TV for live formats that digital platforms struggle to replicate with the same collective intensity.
While scale and access explain why television remains commercially viable, what also sustains advertiser confidence is how deeply the message embeds itself into memory and behaviour. Amit Syngle, MD & CEO, Asian Paints, points out that the medium’s larger canvas allows brands to move beyond functional messaging into visionary narratives that linger long after the ad ends. “Television delivers high-impact audio-visual storytelling, allowing us to create emotionally rich narratives, memorable jingles, and powerful celebrity-led moments that stay with viewers far longer than fleeting digital formats. For a visual, décor-inspired category like ours, mood, texture, and beauty must be experienced in full, and TV allows that to happen,” he says. That emotional immersion translates into measurable outcomes, with television consistently driving the strongest lifts across key brand metrics like top-of-mind awareness, consideration to buy, or even performance signals.
The ability to convert emotion into physical action becomes even more visible in retail-led categories, where television functions as a trigger for store traffic. For CaratLane, expanding aggressively into Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns changed the role TV played in its media mix. Shaifali Gautam, CMO, CaratLane, notes that while the brand has historically been digital-first, “Our investment in TV has grown by over 200 per cent compared to the previous year. It strengthens brand recall and credibility, we see this translate into real behaviour. For instance, a customer in Bengaluru recently walked into our store asking for a specific design she had just seen in our TVC. That immediacy of impact is something TV uniquely delivers.” To track this, the brand correlates campaign flighting with spikes in store walk-ins, website traffic, and regional sales performance, alongside biannual Kantar brand studies and internal customer surveys.
However, not all categories approach television from the same emotional or cultural lens. In high-growth consumer durables, where buyers increasingly research and compare online before making decisions, television’s role is becoming more selective and more tightly linked to intent.
Pragya Bijalwan, Head of Marketing and Communications, Voltas India, explains that with air-conditioner penetration still just 8 per cent nationally, the category is in a rapid expansion phase driven by digitally savvy consumers. “Our strategy is to focus where intent and conversion happen. We prioritise digital and CTV for premium audiences, using precision targeting and measurable outcomes. While traditional TV remains relevant for selective GEC and news environments, the bulk of our investment goes into digital channels that allow us to capture demand and personalise engagement,” she says. For Voltas, television supports credibility and household reach, but performance accountability increasingly shapes budget distribution.
This category-specific recalibration is changing how brands plan video exposure across screens, moving away from channel-led thinking toward audience-led sequencing. Poulomi Roy, CMO, RSH Global observes that consumers today engage with video fluidly acrossl platforms, “When consumers encounter a brand across television, OTT and digital video environments, it builds familiarity and confidence over time. The real impact comes from how these channels complement each other, with television contributing to shared household visibility and scale, and digital and OTT enabling sharper targeting, frequency and contextual relevance across different stages of the purchase journey,” she says.
In Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets, this combined exposure strengthens ‘shelf consideration’ when reinforced by mobile touchpoints. RSH Group tracks ad recall and brand lift alongside longer-term metrics such as penetration and repeat usage. As brands rethink TV’s role within broader video ecosystems, agencies are moving from fixed calendars to moments when attention and demand peak together.
Anil Suryavamshi, Vice President - Digital (South & West), Carat India, who has worked on TV campaigns earlier, shares his experience explaining that television bursts are increasingly timed around launches, sports, important matches and festive cycles, with digital amplification architected around the same audience cohorts. “We consistently observe double-digit uplifts in high-intent behaviours immediately following TV bursts, which reframes TV as a performance multiplier, not just a brand medium. The strategic unlock has been shorter learning cycles like quarterly MMM refreshes and faster experiment design allowing TV’s role to be optimized, not assumed.” he says, noting that marketing mix models, geo-experiments, and downstream digital signals are now central to evaluating impact.
As advertisers rethink how they use TV, broadcasters are rethinking how it should be distributed and monetised across screens. This shift is structural, driven by the belief that India will not move in a straight line from broadcast to digital. Laxmi Shetty, Head of Advertisement Revenue – Broadcast and Digital, ZEE, articulates this clearly when she says, “India’s resilience in television consumption is structural, not temporary. Television remains embedded in family routines and national moments, with sustained daily viewing of nearly 2.8 hours across markets. At ZEE, we have long recognised that India will not follow a Western TV-to-digital substitution curve, but will evolve into a dual-consumption market where television and digital grow in parallel, each serving distinct consumption needs.” This thinking has shaped how broadcasters now design content lifecycles, with IPs increasingly launched across platforms, moving fluidly from broadcast premieres to OTT extensions, FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television) channels, and social formats, allowing content to retain value far beyond a single time band.
That omnichannel strategy becomes even more critical in a country where language, not platform, defines loyalty. Regional television remains the economic backbone of the broadcast ecosystem, anchoring both subscription stability and advertising relevance. For broadcasters, this is not just about reach, but about daily habit formation that keeps households engaged for years. As Shetty explains, “The audience in India is culturally rooted and that is reflected in their content choices as well. While we have always dominated in the broadcast domain through our fiction and Non-fiction IPs, on OTT we are offering a 7 Language specific subscription pack, placing the value equation in the consumers favor. We have adopted a comprehensive ‘language-first’ content strategy, allowing users to consume and pay for content in their preferred regional language. This approach is driven by the fact that over 50 per cent of its consumption comes from non-Hindi languages. We launched over 100+ titles in FY26 and will continue to invest with sharper focus in FY27.”
News broadcasting offers another window into why television retains its role as a collective medium, particularly during moments when information needs to be immediate and credible. Unlike entertainment, where consumption can fragment across devices and time slots, news in India remains largely event-driven, creating appointment viewing at national scale.
Dilip Kumar Singh, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Live Times, notes that “Elections, Union Budgets, court verdicts, and national developments consistently create national viewing moments, with leading Hindi news channels delivering average time spent of 20 to 25 minutes during high-impact cycles.” He reinforces, “Local resonance is decisive.Regional language media is the backbone of India’s television ecosystem. Nearly 55–60 per cent of total TV viewership comes from regional channels. At Live Times, this insight has shaped Live Pradesh, a format that brings state and district-level stories with national relevance into sharper focus.”
Television’s shift to connected devices is also blurring the boundary between linear and digital viewing. CTV now brings digital-style targeting into the living room without changing how families watch content. Creating new ad inventory rather than replacing broadcast viewership.
There’s also an assumption that digital offers a more reliable alternative. “First of all, does digital necessarily offer a better measurement? It does not,” says Joshi. Television, he points out, has an “agnostic” measurement system through BARC, independent of any broadcaster, advertiser or agency.
Digital, by comparison, largely operates through walled gardens, with platforms such as Alphabet and Meta measuring their own ecosystems. “There is no third party which is looking inside the walled gardens and doing a measurement,” Joshi says. For him, the question is not just how much data a medium generates, but who owns the measurement and how much confidence advertisers can place in it.
That does not take away from the strengths of digital, he acknowledges. But does that make television’s measurement inherently inferior simply because it is sample-based? Joshi points to the continued presence of large auto and FMCG brands, which have stayed with television because they have “enough historical evidence that supports their decision.” But how long can historical evidence sustain that confidence without current measurement? While larger broadcasters may have enough established evidence to retain advertisers, smaller platforms depend on reliable measurement to prove their value.
The long-term sustainability of this dual growth model depends on whether traditional media can continue to coexist with digital expansion rather than being crowded out by it. Data from the PwC report suggests that while digital media is projected to claim over 42 per cent of India’s E&M market by 2029, non-digital segments will still grow in absolute terms. Bhuraria observes that “Traditional media is unlikely to regain share, but it will retain scale and relevance as a primary reach and trust layer even as digital crosses 42 per cent of the market. The next decade will be defined by coexistence, with TV anchoring mass audiences and digital driving incremental growth and precision.”
This convergence is reshaping how industry experts think about planning cycles, replacing rigid calendars with signal-driven investment frameworks. Murlidhar T., Senior Vice President – Media Delivery and Operations, WPP Media India, explains that media plans are being rebuilt around a ‘Spike–Amplify–Sustain’ model guided by decision intelligence. “TV is no longer treated as an always-on layer; it is increasingly used to spike impact during launches, sports and festive moments. Once that spike is created, digital and CTV amplify it by following the same audiences across platforms, and between these spikes, targeted digital sustains market presence,” he says. Under this approach, budgets remain fluid, recalibrated in real time based on response signals rather than fixed annual schedules. On the surface, plans may still appear TV-led, but underneath they are data-led systems where television creates fame, digital accelerates growth, and analytics guides optimisation across the funnel.
This shift toward orchestration rather than channel silos is also changing how brands evaluate the return from television-led investments, particularly in categories where credibility and trust are as critical as conversion. For financial services, where reputation is inseparable from consideration, television continues to function as the medium that anchors long-term brand meaning. MVS Murthy, Chief Marketing Officer, Federal Bank, points out, “We are consciously overweight on ATL because reach is foundational to long-term brand building. Television helps anchor our brand ethos, our values, and our relationship-led philosophy, while digital accelerates discovery, engagement, and conversion.” Importantly, he adds that TV is not treated as a vanity medium, with every campaign baselined and tracked across product uptake, cross-sell opportunities, branch conversations, and digital engagement.
So as measurement framework is maturing, television’s role is being redefined not as a blunt reach tool but as an orchestrator of consumer journeys across platforms. Even as digital channels expand rapidly, television continues to anchor large parts of media investment. Murlidhar T. points out, “TV accounts for roughly 35–40 per cent of total media budgets, but those budgets are now fluid and signal-driven, adjusted in real time based on audience response and performance metrics.” This has reframed TV not as an isolated branding expense, but as a foundational layer within adaptive, full-funnel growth systems.
In this sense, India’s continued investment in television is not an act of resistance against digital growth. TV still anchors national conversations and regional identities, while digital platforms extend those narratives into transactional spaces– a layered media architecture where each platform plays a distinct and interdependent role. Going ahead, the question may no longer be whether television will survive, but how effectively it will be woven into an increasingly data-driven growth engine. And as long as audiences continue to gather around shared stories, whether for sport, fiction, or breaking news, television will remain a part of every home in India, and where attention gathers, the ad break is never far behind.
