By Swift TV Team · Thu Oct 08 2026 · 9 min read
Explore how CTV advertising is changing TV ad buying in India, comparing CTV and linear TV across audience targeting, reach, measurement, budgets and FAST.
The debate around CTV vs linear TV advertising in India is losing its usefulness, because the two environments now overlap more than they compete. Linear TV still commands the larger advertising market, but CTV is where the faster growth is happening.
According to the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2026, linear TV advertising declined 4.6% in 2025 to ₹32,855 crore, while CTV advertising doubled from ₹3,000 crore to ₹6,000 crore. The report forecasts CTV advertising to reach ₹8,000 crore in 2026, with linear TV remaining broadly flat.
The audience numbers tell a similar story. It is an estimation by Ormax Media that India's active CTV audience reached 206.9 million in 2026, up 60% from 129.2 million in 2025.
Still, none of this suggests that advertisers are simply swapping television for CTV. It points to a television buying environment that is becoming more fragmented, more addressable and more measurable.
That changes the budget question. Instead of asking "CTV or linear?", advertisers increasingly need to ask which environment gives a campaign the right mix of reach, frequency, context, inventory quality and measurement.
Linear TV remains the dominant part of India's television advertising market.
As per the Pitch Madison's 2026 report, 2025’s linear TV advertising was at ₹32,855 crore, compared with ₹6,000 crore for CTV, which makes it obvious for the gap in absolute scale to be substantial, stating the direction of growth is where the two diverges.
Linear TV advertising declined 4.6% in 2025, while CTV doubled. According to the industry’s assumption CTV is about to reach ₹8,000 crore by the end of 2026, while linear television advertising seems to remain broadly flat.
It helps to remember that growth rate and market size are not the same thing.
CTV's faster growth does not mean it has overtaken linear TV. Rather it signifies a larger share of incremental large screen investment can now be directed towards connected environments.
The opportunity is therefore not to replace one with another, but to understand what each environment is actually delivering.
CTV's biggest change in India is no longer its potential. It is its actual scale. Ormax Media estimates that India's active CTV audience reached 206.9 million in 2026, a 60% increase from 2025. The same research puts India's total OTT audience at 664.9 million.
Separately, research from WPP Media and The Trade Desk, conducted by Ormax Media, estimates approximately 207 million CTV viewers across 62 to 65 million households.
That scale changes where CTV belongs in a media plan. It is increasingly hard to treat connected TV advertising as a niche digital extension aimed only at affluent urban audiences. It is becoming a mainstream large screen environment, including beyond India's largest metros.
At the same time, CTV should not be judged by exactly the same logic as linear television. A linear buy is largely built around programmes, channels, markets and time slots. A CTV buy can add further variables:
A CTV buy can introduce additional variables such as:
This does not automatically make CTV a better medium.
It makes it a different buying environment.
And that distinction is important when budgets are being moved.
The removal of India's limit of 12 minutes of advertising per hour adds another variable to the television market.
In August 2026, the government amended the Cable Television Networks Rules to remove the provision that restricted the amount of advertising that could be carried during a television programme. The original restriction dates back to 2006, and TRAI subsequently introduced corresponding advertising duration regulations in 2012.
For broadcasters, this means greater flexibility in how advertising inventory is packaged and sold. However for advertisers, the more relevant question is what happens to the value of an impression when more inventory becomes available.
More minutes can increase supply, but they do not automatically increase audience attention. That distinction matters when comparing linear and connected environments. A linear broadcaster controls the structure of the commercial break.
A CTV platform also controls the ad experience within its own environment, but can potentially bring additional variables into the buying and reporting process.
So the removal of the cap is not, on its own, a reason to move more budget into or away from linear TV. What it does is make inventory quality and exposure management more important.
One of the more significant developments in India's television ecosystem is the emergence of linear TV streaming.
Traditional distributors are increasingly experimenting with app-based environments that bring live television and OTT content together.
Dish TV-owned Vzy, for example, launched an app carrying more than 200 live TV channels alongside 29+ OTT platforms. Tata Play, Sun Direct and GTPL Hathway have also been reported as exploring similar models.
The significance for advertisers is not simply that another streaming product has entered the market.
It is that the old distinction between "TV inventory" and "streaming inventory" is becoming less precise.
A viewer can watch a live news channel, switch to an OTT programme and then return to a scheduled entertainment channel without necessarily changing the physical screen.
The connected television becomes the common environment.
That matters for media planning because the advertiser is no longer buying only a distribution method.
The advertiser is buying access to a viewing environment, and within that environment, different types of inventory can serve different campaign objectives.
Rather than asking which format is superior, it is more useful to ask what job each one needs to do.
Linear TV: Scale and Simultaneity
Linear television remains hard to replace when a campaign needs broad, simultaneous exposure. Major sporting events, national launches, entertainment properties and big cultural moments can generate concentrated reach that remains valuable to mass market advertisers.
Its established ecosystem of broadcasters, agencies, programming and measurement also makes it a familiar place to buy.
The limitation is flexibility.
Advertisers generally have less control over the individual audience characteristics of each impression than they can potentially obtain in connected environments.
CTV: Addressability and Flexibility
CTV brings internet based delivery to the television screen. That opens up audience targeting, contextual selection, frequency management and more granular campaign reporting.
It also brings fragmentation. CTV inventory can sit across multiple apps, platforms, devices and supply paths, and different partners may define audience, completion and measurement differently. Buying CTV is therefore not just a matter of finding more inventory.
It is about identifying which inventory is transparent and measurable enough for the campaign objective.
FAST: Television Behaviour Over Connected Distribution
FAST advertising occupies an interesting position in this comparison. Free ad supported streaming television keeps several characteristics of linear TV:
The difference is that the content is delivered through connected infrastructure. That gives FAST a different proposition from both conventional linear television and subscription OTT services. For advertisers, it can offer access to viewers who still prefer the simplicity of channel based television while watching on internet connected devices.
It is estimated that when the final industry's report of 2026 comes out India's FAST audience might touch the 35.2 million viewership, suggesting that FAST has grown into a measurable part of the wider streaming market.
As CTV budgets grow, the central challenge shifts from finding reach to evaluating the quality of that reach.
Three questions become particularly important:
1. Where did the impression come from?
An advertiser should be able to identify the environment in which an impression was delivered. That means understanding:
Standards such as app-ads.txt and sellers.json help improve supply chain transparency, but advertisers should still ask partners to explain exactly where their inventory originates. A large audience number is not enough. The quality of the inventory behind it matters.
2. How is exposure being measured?
Completion rate is useful, but it does not answer every question. An advertiser should understand how a partner measures:
CTV also introduces a specific measurement consideration: the screen may be shared. A connected TV impression can represent a household viewing environment rather than one individually identifiable viewer. That does not make the impression less valuable. It means the advertiser needs to know exactly what the reported metric represents.
3. Can the reporting support optimisation?
CTV's advantage over traditional television should not simply be that it offers a dashboard. The more important question is whether the reporting provides information that can influence the next buying decision.
Advertisers should ideally be able to see campaign delivery across dimensions such as:
This is where programmatic CTV can move beyond traditional reach reporting and become a more iterative media buying environment.
Swift TV sits within the FAST segment of this connected TV ecosystem, combining free, channel based viewing with connected distribution. Its channel proposition spans entertainment, movies, music, devotional, regional and news content, giving advertisers access to viewers who continue to watch television in a scheduled, lean back format without a subscription barrier.
That distinction matters. FAST does not need to imitate an OTT catalogue to compete for viewing time. Its strength is the familiar television experience of channels, genres and scheduled programming, delivered through connected infrastructure.
For advertisers, that creates an opportunity to reach television style viewing behaviour through a programmatic and connected environment.
Swift TV's advertising inventory is powered by TGM's programmatic ad tech ecosystem, along with the strategic partnering device distribution by GAIA OS creates a route for advertisers and agencies to access FAST inventory through a broader connected TV buying infrastructure.
The data does not support a simple recommendation to move television budgets wholesale into CTV. Linear TV remains much larger in absolute advertising value. CTV, however, is growing faster and offers capabilities that traditional linear buying does not provide in the same way. A practical 2026 approach is to give each environment a different role:
This approach avoids treating CTV as a replacement for television. It treats CTV as another way of buying television audiences.
CTV has not replaced linear television in India, and it does not need to.
The more significant change is that television audiences are now spread across broadcast, connected TV, streaming and FAST environments, while the large screen remains central to shared viewing. The advertising market is responding accordingly.
Linear TV continues to provide scale. CTV is growing rapidly and brings greater flexibility around targeting, delivery and measurement. FAST carries the familiar, channel based television experience into connected distribution.
So the strategic question in the CTV vs linear TV advertising debate for 2026 is not simply where the audience is growing. It is which buying environment can deliver the required audience at the required frequency, with enough transparency to prove what was actually purchased.
That is where the distinction between linear TV and CTV becomes commercially useful: not as a question of which one wins, but of what each one can deliver, and how confidently an advertiser can measure it.
For agencies and advertisers exploring programmatic access to FAST and connected TV inventory, TGM provides access to Swift TV's advertising ecosystem.
Q1. Is CTV replacing linear TV advertising in India?
No. Linear TV remains significantly larger in advertising spend, while CTV is growing at a faster rate. The more relevant shift is the allocation of incremental large-screen investment towards connected environments.
Q2. How much is CTV advertising worth in India in 2026?
Pitch Madison estimates that CTV advertising reached ₹6,000 crore in 2025 and forecasts it to reach ₹8,000 crore in 2026. Linear TV advertising was ₹32,855 crore in 2025 and is expected to remain broadly flat.
Q3. What does the removal of the 12-minute TV ad cap mean?
It gives broadcasters greater flexibility over advertising inventory. It does not automatically mean that additional advertising minutes will generate additional viewer attention. Advertisers therefore need to continue evaluating inventory quality, frequency and exposure.
Q4. Is FAST the same as CTV?
Not exactly. CTV describes the connected-screen environment, while FAST refers to free, ad-supported streaming television delivered through that environment. FAST typically retains scheduled, channel-based programming rather than an entirely on-demand viewing model.
Q5. Should advertisers shift their TV budgets to CTV?
Not as a blanket strategy. Linear TV remains useful for mass simultaneous reach, while CTV and FAST can complement it with connected distribution, targeting, frequency management and additional measurement capabilities. The appropriate allocation depends on the campaign objective.
