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India now has more monthly online-video viewers than the United States and Canada have people combined.
According to Ormax Media’s latest OTT Audience Report, 664.9 million Indians watched online video in 2026, up 11% from 601.2 million last year. Around 45% of India’s population now watches some form of online video at least once a month. Active paid OTT subscriptions have climbed even faster, rising 16% to 172.6 million.
Those are very large numbers for an industry that barely existed in its current form a decade ago. But buried inside the report is an even better indicator of where streaming is heading.
India’s connected-TV audience has reached 206.9 million people, up 60% in a single year. Two years ago, it was just 69.7 million. OTT spent years teaching Indians that you did not need a television to watch television. Now Indians are increasingly using televisions to watch OTT.
How we got 665 million people streaming?
India’s streaming story did not begin with Netflix.
Services such as BIGFlix, nexGTv, SonyLIV and others experimented with internet video before streaming became a mainstream habit. Hotstar’s arrival in 2015 helped bring sports and entertainment onto phones at scale, particularly through cricket.
Then 2016 completely changed the market.Netflix entered India in January as part of a global expansion into more than 130 countries. Amazon Prime Video followed in December, launching at ₹499 for an entire year, compared with Netflix’s ₹500 monthly entry price at the time.
Yet the biggest streaming catalyst of 2016 was arguably not a streaming company at all.
It was Jio.
Mobile data in India used to be expensive enough that watching a film on 4G could feel like a financial decision. TRAI data shows that the average cost of wireless data fell from about ₹226 per GB in 2015 to ₹75.57 in 2016, ₹19.35 in 2017 and ₹11.78 by 2018. Over the same period, data consumption shot up.
Once watching a video stopped eating through your monthly data budget, everything from YouTube and cricket to web series became easier to consume.
India’s OTT revolution therefore developed differently from markets such as the US. Streaming here was largely built around the smartphone first, not the living-room television.
Then Covid gave an already-growing habit a giant shove.
By 2021, Ormax estimated that India had 353.2 million OTT viewers, representing roughly a quarter of the population. Only 40.7 million were directly paying for subscriptions themselves, though 110.5 million had access to paid content through family accounts, friends, bundles and other arrangements.
Five years later, the total audience has almost doubled.
That is roughly 312 million additional online-video viewers in five years.
But getting Indians to watch was only half the challenge.
India loves streaming. Paying was harder.
By 2024, the streaming industry had run into a slightly awkward problem. The OTT audience was still expanding rapidly, but almost all the growth was coming from people watching free content.
India’s OTT audience reached 547.3 million in 2024, up 13.8% from the previous year. But most of that growth came from people watching free content. The audience for free, ad-supported streaming grew 21%, while the audience for paid subscription platforms actually fell 2%.
By then, nearly 3 in every 4 OTT viewers in India were watching free content.
Direct-to-consumer paid subscriptions stood at around 99.6 million, with paying users holding an average 2.5 subscriptions each. Streaming had reached hundreds of millions of Indians. Convincing all of them to pull out a debit card every month was another job entirely.
India’s platforms responded in very Indian ways: cheaper mobile-only plans, advertising, telecom bundles, broadband bundles, sports, regional programming and increasingly large free libraries.
The latest numbers indicate that paid usage is now growing again. Ormax estimates 172.6 million active paid subscriptions in 2026, up from 148.2 million last year. That figure includes subscriptions obtained through telecom plans and OTT aggregators, so it is not directly comparable with older D2C-only figures.
That nuance also explains why the Indian streaming market cannot be understood simply by counting Netflix-style monthly memberships.
You might be paying for OTT through your fibre connection without thinking of yourself as an OTT subscriber at all.
The television makes a comeback: For most of India's OTT history, the smartphone was the main character. That is starting to change quickly.
Connected-TV audiences grew from 69.7 million in 2024 to 129.2 million in 2025 and 206.9 million in 2026. In just two years, the audience has nearly tripled.
And CTV is changing viewing behaviour too.
JioHotstar says around 40% of its watch time now comes from the big screen, with CTV users spending more than 100 minutes per day on the platform, roughly 1.5 times the time spent by mobile users. Its data also shows that television remains a shared device, with a co-viewing factor of 3.1 people.
So, after years of everyone disappearing into their own screens, streaming is slowly finding its way back into the living room.
The television itself survived. The pipe carrying entertainment into it changed. Cable and DTH now sit beside YouTube, Netflix, JioHotstar, Prime Video and dozens of other apps on the same home screen.
That is why Ormax describes India as moving away from a predominantly smartphone-led digital-video market towards a more complicated multi-screen ecosystem.
Meanwhile, "OTT" itself is getting messy: Indian OTT viewers spend an average of 14.9 hours per week watching online video, adding up to an estimated 517 billion hours annually. But those hours include much more than a Netflix series or a Prime Video film. Social media, micro-dramas and FAST channels are all competing for the same attention.
Some of the fastest-growing formats make the change obvious. Micro-dramas grew their audience by 50% in 2026. K-dramas grew 48%. Anime grew 32%.
Micro-dramas are particularly interesting because they sit almost at the opposite end of the entertainment spectrum from connected TV.
Ormax estimated that micro-dramas had already attracted 73.2 million viewers by July 2025, less than a year after becoming a meaningful category in India. Their audience skewed towards smaller towns, rural India and free ad-supported consumption. CTV users, meanwhile, were relatively more urban and affluent.
One market is therefore growing in two directions at once.
At one end, people are watching premium long-form content together on increasingly large television screens. On the other hand, millions are consuming tiny dramas on phones.
Netflix is no longer competing only with Prime Video. A 45-minute episode is also competing with YouTube, Instagram, a two-minute drama, anime, cricket and whatever else manages to win the next free half-hour.
Streaming is even rebuilding television: One of the newer categories in Ormax’s 2026 report is FAST, or Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television. There are already an estimated 35.2 million FAST viewers in India.
FAST is basically internet television funded by ads. Instead of paying for a subscription and choosing an episode, you can open a channel where programming is already running.
Yes, streaming spent years liberating us from scheduled television and has now invented something that looks suspiciously like scheduled television. The difference is distribution. FAST channels come through the internet and can sit alongside every other streaming app on a smart TV.
For a market where free streaming has historically attracted far more users than paid streaming, the model fits neatly.
The streaming wars are also getting fewer players: The first phase of India's OTT boom was about launching platforms. The next one is increasingly about scale.
In February 2025, JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar came together to form JioHotstar after the merger of Viacom18 and Star India. At launch, JioStar said the combined service had close to 3 lakh hours of entertainment and more than 50 crore users.
The platform now says it reaches more than 450 million monthly active users across every Indian pin code and has crossed 1 billion downloads on Google Play. This is where the economics of Indian OTT are heading.
Owning one hit show is useful. Owning sports, television programming, films, regional content, international programming, advertising inventory and distribution across phones and TVs gives a platform many more ways to keep viewers inside its ecosystem.
India’s enormous audience also needs enormous amounts of programming. JioStar says India produces around 1,800 films and more than 400 web series every year, alongside over 200,000 hours of television programming.
The streaming battle has become a fight over the entire entertainment day, not one evening binge.
So what exactly has OTT become? In 2021, roughly one in four Indians belonged to the online-video universe. In 2026, it is nearly one in two.
There are 665 million OTT viewers, 173 million active paid subscriptions and 207 million connected-TV viewers. Meanwhile, micro-dramas are booming, free internet television has arrived and India's largest platforms increasingly combine television, sport, films and streaming inside the same app.
For years, the popular prediction was that OTT would replace television. But India is producing a stranger outcome.
The phone did become a television. But the television also became an internet device. Free and paid content are growing together. Short-form viewing can boom at the same time as long-form viewing moves onto bigger screens.
India did not replace one entertainment system with another. It simply added more screens, more formats and far more ways to spend 14.9 hours every week avoiding whatever else we were supposed to be doing.
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