India’s enormous TV universe of 900 million individuals continues to grow and is set to achieve a future scale of 1,300 million on the back of rapid economic growth. There is also the potential conversion of one-third of the country’s homes, which don’t have a TV just yet. The current scale and expected growth in the future will keep TV audiences substantially higher than digital video platforms. In this article, we delve deeper into the massive audience exclusivity that TV possesses over digital video in India.

While the reported online video viewers are a touch below 500 million, the daily reach levels are much lower for even the biggest video platform - YouTube - at 360 million, according to App Annie report in August 2022. This further confirms the presence of over 400-500 million TV viewers who remain out of bounds for digital video platforms. Ormax Media’s OTT audience report 2021 estimates, India’s OTT audience universe stands at 353 million which not only shows the wide reach gulf vis-à-vis TV but also highlights that only TV can provide unique audiences at a huge scale. This gulf in scale between TV and digital video has been a key factor behind brands across categories and life-stages, making TV the core of their media plans.

While TV has broad-based reach across geographies, pop strata and various affluence segments, digital video in contrast gets more than 60%+ of its watch time from places other than the top metros. Additionally, while nearly 80% of TV universe is watching pay TV content, paid OTT audience estimated at 109 million by Ormax barely constitutes about 30% of the overall 353 million OTT audience universe. This indicates that TV possesses a greater proportion of affluent audiences relative to digital video, which has attracted its core viewers from lower socio-economic classes and outside the top 6 metros that comprise of only 11% of the OTT universe.     

Exclusive digital audience is miniscule in comparison to TV, unlikely to gain adequate scale this decade

Digital video’s exclusive audience is only 12 million, as per the FICCI-E&Y M&E 2022 report which is no match for the scale of exclusive 400mn+ audiences offered by TV. Despite the smartphone user base being over 500 million, it has been unable to provide an exclusive digital audience. This is best exemplified in cord cutters being limited to a few million only.

Considering the current base of digital video’s exclusive audience and expected growth rates over the next few years, it is unlikely to provide brands with a significant incremental audience over TV for the remainder of this decade. TV in India unlike other global markets will continue to expand its universe with a huge opportunity to reach another 400 million people moving forward and its scale of exclusive audiences is only going to get bigger in the years to come.