As we begin the New Year, we spoke to industry leaders to reflect on the shifts that shaped 2025 and the forces expected to define 2026. For Kartik Mahadev, Chief Marketing Officer, ZEEL and ZEE5, 2025 marked the moment India’s viewing decisively turned language-first, culture-native, and deeply personal across screens.
Reflecting on the year that was, Mahadev points to how authenticity, local emotion and cross-platform discovery became the real drivers of scale and engagement.
On the key trend that defined 2025, he says, “2025 was the year India’s viewing truly became language-first and culture-native across every screen: be it streaming, connected devices and pay TV. Audiences actively chose stories that felt like their own, rooted in local emotion, dialect and provided a certain 'seekh' or 'surprise' in their lived reality. For us at ZEE5, TV shows led this shift with a 26% surge in watch-time, reaffirming their cultural centrality. This insight guided everything: how we create brands that feel personal, shows for an omni world, how we design discovery journeys for the Many Bharat's, and how people stay engaged across platforms. Large screen viewing, language-based packs and ad supported FAST channels all grew together. It’s a clear signal that India’s entertainment future will be built on content relevance across occasions, not one-size-fits-all scale. At Z, this was evident as Tumm Se Tumm Tak travelled across ecosystems, delivering 472 million streaming minutes (life-time numbers), demonstrating strong cross-platform resonance. Our Telugu post-theatrical Sankrantiki Vasthunam delivered an 18 TVR and 400 million streaming minutes, showing the power of omni-platform discovery. A language-first brand architecture led to 65% of our total consumption coming from language markets, proving that authenticity drives what India discovers, shares and loves.”
Looking ahead, Mahadev believes the next phase of growth will be driven not just by language or scale, but by intelligence, context and formats that reflect how audiences live, watch and participate in culture. On the trends expected to shape 2026, he adds, “If 2025 was about language and culture, 2026 will be about context. The real leap will come from organisations that have done the hard work on data, linking it to product innovation by moving beyond “What can AI do?” to “Where does AI remove friction for the viewer?” We’ll see a shift from basic recommendation to context-aware serving: platforms anticipating intent across language, mood, time of day and viewing occasion. Homepages, thumbnails, trailers and offers will adapt in real time. Guesswork and gut based on institutional memory will change to real-time signals and dynamic systems that are Ai-led and human approved. As catalogues deepen to serve diverse audiences, this kind of hyper-local awareness and hyper-personalise experience will become a powerful retention engine, sharply reducing choice fatigue for Indian audiences. 2026 will be big for formats that travel fast and feel current. Short-form and micro-dramas will evolve from “being snacky” into serious storytelling and potentially insight generation tools for diverse needs that are mobile-first, younger viewers, language agnostic viewers. Live programming – festivals, reality peaks, special events will bring back appointment viewing and shared emotion through communal experiences at scale. These formats will unlock new monetisation models, and create a bridge between entertainment, community participation and real-time cultural expression. For marketers, this is where brand, fandom and conversation meet. Connected TV will firmly establish itself as India’s new prime time in 2026. With smart TVs adoption scaling up, families are treating CTV as their anchor device for language-led co-viewing. For marketers, the collective viewing and a highly attentive impression serving ability through high quality web series originals, daily engagement TV shows and cinema will see deeper engagement here. For brands, CTV sits at a sweet spot that has the emotion and immersion of TV, with the targeting and measurement of digital. It will become a high-impact medium for storytelling and outcomes: building memory, driving performance, and redefining what scaled, lean-back engagement looks like in India.”
(As told to Ruchika Jha)
