CTV in India: Who’s actually in control?

As Connected TV investments continue to climb in India, a persistent question keeps surfacing within advertiser organisations: who truly owns the channel?

It sounds straightforward. In reality, CTV sits uncomfortably between television, digital, and performance teams, borrowing expectations from each without being fully integrated into any one function. Even as spending has shifted from test budgets to regular allocations, internal ownership models have lagged behind.

The outcome is a channel that is widely purchased, confidently pitched, and increasingly examined, yet seldom tied to a single team accountable for results. In many companies, CTV appears on everyone’s plan but belongs to no one’s scorecard.

For marketers, the uncertainty often comes from how CTV is positioned internally. Veteran marketer Shubhranshu Singh, while joking that CMOs should probably claim it, notes that the medium still occupies a hazy space between traditional TV thinking and digital performance logic. “It’s true that CTV still sits in a grey area between television legacy media and digital,” he says. “Historically, it’s been treated as an extension of linear TV. But more recently, and for good reasons, digital and performance teams view it as part of the addressable, data-led ecosystem.”

On paper, responsibility is often centralised. “In most large organisations, a centralised media team takes ownership,” Singh explains. In practice, that formal structure doesn’t eliminate deeper friction. “What’s important is to view CTV as a full-funnel medium rather than just a channel,” he adds, suggesting that accountability is only now starting to shift from siloed channel teams toward more unified media leadership.

The lack of clear ownership, Singh says, has real consequences. “The absence of clear ownership can create friction,” he notes. “It can also lead to siloed planning, where CTV is either treated purely as a branding vehicle or judged only on short-term performance metrics.”

On the buying side, this can drive inefficiencies. “You often see parallel negotiations with broadcasters, OTT platforms, and programmatic partners, which reduces scale efficiency,” Singh says. Measurement becomes equally fragmented. “The evaluation currency differs — one team looks at reach, another focuses on ROI.”

This uncertainty has lingered even as CTV has moved beyond novelty to deliver meaningful scale. By late 2025, India was estimated to have around 60–65 million connected TV households, fuelled by smart TV adoption, cheaper broadband, and the rapid growth of ad-supported OTT viewing. While still well below linear television’s reach of over 300 million households, it is large enough to secure CTV a regular place in mainstream media plans.

Ad spending has mirrored this rise. Industry estimates suggest CTV ad investments in India reached roughly ?2,300–3,000 crore by the end of 2025, growing as much as 40% year-on-year. For major advertisers, CTV is no longer considered experimental inventory. It is increasingly slotted in as a premium video layer within annual plans, sitting somewhere between TV’s scale and digital’s addressability.

What hasn’t evolved at the same pace is organisational clarity. Shradha Agarwal, Co-founder and Global CEO of Grapes Worldwide, says CTV ownership rarely rests neatly with a single team today. “CTV ownership today doesn’t sit neatly with one team,” she says. “While it often began with traditional TV teams, responsibility is gradually shifting toward digital and media teams, with performance teams playing a much larger role than before.”

As measurement tools improve, Agarwal notes that companies are testing more collaborative models. “As CTV becomes more data-driven and measurable, organisations are moving toward shared ownership, where TV, digital, and performance teams work together against common KPIs,” she explains.

The teams shaping strategy, she adds, are “those best equipped to combine storytelling with targeting, measurement, and optimisation.”

But shared ownership brings its own complications. “The absence of clear ownership has, at times, created friction,” Agarwal admits. “We see overlaps in planning, fragmented budgets, and different success metrics across TV, digital, and performance teams, which can slow decisions and dilute impact.”

While she sees this as a transitional phase, the day-to-day reality is that agencies are often left mediating between competing internal priorities, smoothing over differences without fully resolving them.

From the adtech perspective, the conversation is being reframed. Nikhil Kumar, Chief Growth Officer at mediasmart by Affle, argues that CTV’s hybrid nature makes the traditional ownership debate less useful. As targeting, measurement, and outcome-based capabilities on CTV have advanced, performance teams are increasingly including it in their plans. “Because CTV spans both brand and performance goals, planners are starting to think beyond silos,” Kumar says. “Ultimately, the focus shifts from who owns CTV to how we make CTV work harder across the full funnel.”

Programmatic activation is central to this shift. “When CTV is activated through a full-funnel programmatic DSP, it stops behaving like a standalone branding channel and starts acting as a performance lever,” Kumar explains.

This approach, he says, allows for a more unified view of exposure, frequency, and outcomes across screens, making it easier to track CTV’s influence on downstream engagement and action.

However, even if programmatic integration streamlines execution, it doesn’t fully answer the internal question of accountability when results underperform.

Platform players see the fragmentation in more practical terms. Abhijeet Rajpurohit, COO and Co-founder of CloudTV, says ownership patterns are largely shaped by organisational legacy. “Because CTV sits at the intersection of TV and digital, ownership usually depends on a company’s heritage,” he says. “Broadcast-led organisations often assign CTV to TV or brand teams, while streaming-first or digital-native businesses typically place it with digital or performance teams.”

The biggest issues, he adds, surface in hybrid structures. “In organisations where both TV and digital teams coexist or are still evolving, ownership often becomes unclear, as each team views CTV through its own lens and has only a partial understanding of the channel,” Rajpurohit explains.

That ambiguity directly impacts execution. “Planning, buying, and measurement often become misaligned,” he says. “TV teams apply reach-based logic, digital teams prioritise performance metrics, and CTV ends up being judged inconsistently.” The result is “duplicated effort, internal debate, and underuse of CTV’s full potential.” True end-to-end expertise across both TV and digital, he notes, “is still rare,” which is why fragmentation continues.

Taken together, these perspectives point to a consistent theme. CTV has budgets, dashboards, and growing expectations. What many Indian organisations still lack is a single internal owner ready — and empowered — to take responsibility for outcomes.

As CTV becomes more embedded in annual planning and faces greater scrutiny from leadership, that grey area becomes harder to sustain. For now, the channel remains suspended between teams, shaped as much by organisational inertia as by media strategy. And as its role in the mix expands, the real question is whether internal structures will ever fully catch up.