Television
Television thrives in India’s digital age with growing reach and influence
After predictions of decline in the early 2020s, India’s broadcast industry is proving its enduring strength and adaptability
MUMBAI: For much of the early 2020s, broadcast TV was treated as an ageing medium waiting to be buried by streaming platforms and smartphones. The story seemed settled. Viewers would migrate, advertisers would follow, and the big screen in the living room would quietly lose relevance. Yet in 2026, the script looks strikingly different. Linear television in India is not shrinking into nostalgia. It is reasserting itself as a powerful, evolving mass medium that still commands scale, attention and cultural clout.
The shift is not driven by sentiment but by behaviour. While media consumption has evolved and choices have multiplied, television has remained a constant, providing structure and familiarity in an otherwise fragmented ecosystem. The endless scroll through OTT libraries often produces fatigue rather than freedom. Many spend more time choosing than watching. Decision fatigue has crept into entertainment, and structured programming suddenly feels convenient. Scheduled content removes the burden of choice and restores a sense of flow to viewing.
“Appointment viewing continues to thrive because compelling content still inspires audiences to tune in together, a behaviour that remains consistent across both metros and Bharat,” says Sujata Dwibedy, CEO of Dentsu X India. In metros, where OTT fatigue and choice overload are rising, she notes that linear TV continues to offer clarity and more intentional viewing.
“The modern viewer is exhausted by the paradox of choice, making the structure of a scheduled broadcast feel like a luxury once again,” says Rajesh Sethi, partner and leader for media, entertainment and sports at PwC.
Sethi argues that appointment viewing now feels like a luxury. In a cluttered media environment, curated schedules offer relief. That relief translates into predictable audience spikes and consolidated reach that advertisers still value. “While streaming offers infinite options, appointment viewing remains resilient because it replaces aimless scrolling with a deliberate ritual, cutting through decision fatigue with the power of anticipation.”
“Linear television continues to deliver unmatched daily reach, especially in markets like India, where it remains part of household viewing routines,” says L V Krishnan, chief executive of TAM Media Research. “Rather than TV versus OTT, the reality is that both platforms increasingly work together, especially when viewed from the lens of the living room screen.”
The numbers reinforce the mood. Kantar Media Compass estimates that while digital-only users have climbed to about 313 million, roughly 689 million Indians continue to watch linear television regularly. Broadcast TV remains one of the most used daily media platforms in the country, a reminder that scale still matters in a market as vast and diverse as India.
BARC India’s data shows just how vast. The television universe has expanded to over 230 million households, reaching close to 900 million individuals. Dwibedy points out that the number of TV viewing households continues to climb, with India reaching 230 million TV homes in FY2025. No other medium in India offers that kind of footprint. For national campaigns, election coverage, sports tournaments or mass-market product launches, television still delivers unmatched reach.
She adds that weekly BARC data continues to reinforce television’s unmatched scale. In Week 6 of 2026, the top 10 GEC channels including Star Plus, Zee TV, Star Utsav, Sony TV, Sony SAB and Colors reached approximately 74.3 crore viewers, underscoring TV’s enduring mass impact in a fragmented content world.
Measurement has also grown sharper. Since 2025, BARC’s weekly unrolled data system has replaced older rolling averages, giving advertisers more granular and timely insights. This has narrowed digital’s historical advantage in real-time measurement and made TV planning more dynamic. Campaign optimisation on television is no longer slow or blunt. It is increasingly data-led.
Television also retains a social quality that personal devices struggle to replicate. Prime-time co-viewing averages about 3.4 people per set. Families still gather around serials, reality shows and cricket matches. News events unfold collectively. Advertisements land in shared spaces, often triggering immediate discussion or recall. The living room remains a site of communal media consumption, especially in multi-generational households.
In Bharat’s expanding markets, the growing adoption of connected televisions is reshaping viewing habits. According to Dwibedy, India’s smart TV category demand is consolidating around larger and premium screens, with 33 to 43-inch models alone capturing over 55 percent of the market, signalling accelerated digital TV upgrading across Tier 2 and Tier 3 households. Rising internet penetration, she adds, is complementing not replacing television, with digital expansion shown to drive higher TV consumption across both urban and rural audiences.
Advertisers have noticed. Even as digital ad spending grows, television continues to attract strong investments from fast-moving consumer goods, retail and e-commerce brands. Linear TV remains a top-of-funnel driver capable of building salience at scale. For brands seeking trust and memorability, the big screen still delivers.
“For advertisers, this convergence of high-intent metro audiences, expanding Bharat adoption of connected TVs, and content driven collective viewing creates an environment where attention is natural, recall is stronger, and storytelling carries far deeper emotional resonance,” Dwibedy explains. In a world dominated by endless scrolling, she argues, appointment viewing remains a more meaningful and strategically potent path to impact.
Academic research lends weight to this resilience. A January 2026 study titled “Future of TV in India,” by Viswanath Pingali and Ankur Sinha of IIM Ahmedabad uses statistical modelling to track long-term trends. The projection is striking. India’s TV audience is expected to reach about 1.03 billion by 2029, growing at roughly 2.37 per cent annually. Rather than being cannibalised by the internet, television often benefits from it. Internet access can make television more attractive as a primary household screen, not less.
The study also highlights the role of rising prosperity in lower-income states. For every Rs 1 lakh increase in state GDP per capita in such regions, tens of millions of new viewers are projected to join the TV universe over time. As incomes rise and infrastructure improves, television often becomes one of the first major household technologies adopted.
Television’s influence extends beyond commerce. Same-language subtitling has supported literacy gains. Exposure to television content correlates with greater awareness of financial independence and evolving gender norms. The medium continues to function as a carrier of social messaging and behavioural cues, especially in regions where other information channels are limited.
Then comes connected television, the quiet bridge between old and new. The Ormax OTT Audience Report 2025 shows India’s CTV base surging to about 129.2 million users, after year-on-year growth approaching 85 to 87 per cent. Tens of millions of homes now stream digital video on television screens. For many households, the TV is becoming the central digital screen rather than a purely broadcast device.
These CTV homes, estimated at roughly 35 to 40 million, increasingly treat the television as a hub for both streaming and satellite content. In several markets, CTV has emerged as the second most used screen for digital video after smartphones, overtaking laptops and tablets. The result is not a replacement of television but an expansion of what television means.
Advertising strategies are adapting accordingly. Marketers can now pair the reach of linear TV with the targeting capabilities of digital video on the same screen. Hybrid campaigns blend mass awareness with precision, making the television set a versatile marketing platform rather than a legacy channel. As Sethi notes, “This shift is driving a hybrid future where OTT platforms are integrating live sports and weekly ‘event’ drops to recreate a sense of urgency and community.”
Krishnan argues that linear TV’s strength lies in simplicity and habit. “Viewers can switch on and watch without navigating multiple apps. It remains the shared family screen where news, regional programming and prime-time shows become collective experiences. Cost, internet access and familiarity with traditional viewing keep it relevant for large audiences.”
He adds that television’s biggest edge is appointment viewing. “Live sports, reality finales, elections and breaking news create urgency and real-time participation that on-demand platforms are still developing. These moments bring simultaneous mass audiences, making them culturally significant and highly valuable for advertisers seeking scale.”
None of this suggests digital is weak. India’s OTT universe is estimated at about 601 million users, including around 148 million paid subscriptions. Digital video remains powerful, particularly among younger audiences. Kantar notes that about one in four Indians can be classified as digital-only users. Viewers aged 15 to 34 lean heavily towards online platforms and social video. Media consumption is fragmenting, not reversing.
Yet fragmentation has not dethroned television. Instead, it has clarified its role. TV is where scale lives, where families still converge, where brands achieve broad visibility and where cultural moments become national conversations. Streaming offers depth and personalisation. Television offers breadth and a shared experience. The two increasingly coexist.
“The industry has realised that if everything is available all the time, nothing feels special. It is the event that creates cultural relevance and drives long-term subscription retention,” Sethi says.
The obituary writers underestimated television’s ability to adapt. The medium has absorbed digital tools, improved measurement, embraced connectivity and retained its social core. In India’s media economy of 2026, television is not a relic. It is a resilient platform evolving in step with its audience.
The big screen in the living room is no longer just surviving the streaming era. It is shaping it. And as India marches towards a billion-viewer television market, the so-called old medium looks less like yesterday’s technology and more like tomorrow’s anchor.
Sports
India’s women are playing cricket and they are just getting started
A sweeping BBC-Collective Newsroom study finds women’s participation doubled in six years, viewership is soaring, but stubborn stereotypes, safety fears threaten to derail the momentum
NEW DELHI: Cricket. It always comes back to cricket. But this time, the story is not about Virat Kohli or the men in blue. It is about the 10 per cent of Indian women who now pick up a bat and play, double the number who did six years ago. Add the women’s World Cup triumph on home soil in 2025, the explosion of the Women’s Premier League and a generation of young women who have decided that sport is, finally, for them, and the picture that emerges from the most comprehensive study of women and sport in India ever conducted is one of genuine, measurable, exhilarating change.
The BBC and Collective Newsroom commissioned global research firm Kantar to survey 10,304 people aged 15 and over across 14 Indian states between December 2025 and January 2026. The results, published today, are compared with an identical survey conducted in 2020. The findings cover a population base of 751.62 million people.
Cricket dominates and the gender gap is closing fast
The headline number is stark. Women’s cricket participation has doubled, from 5 per cent in 2020 to 10 per cent in 2026. Among women aged 15 to 24, the jump is even more dramatic: from 6 per cent to 16 per cent, one in six young women. The gender gap, once a chasm, has narrowed sharply. In 2020, five men played cricket for every woman; today that ratio has fallen to three to one. A quarter of all cricket players in India are now women.
The gains are not confined to one corner of the country. All but two of the 14 states surveyed, Maharashtra and Bihar, reported rises in the share of women playing cricket. In Uttar Pradesh, the number grew tenfold, from 1 per cent to 10 per cent. The UP Warriorz franchise, which plays in the Women’s Premier League, has invested heavily in talent development; in late 2025 Lucknow University reported its highest-ever turnout at women’s cricket trials.
Cricket has now decisively broken away from kabaddi as India’s most played sport. Kabaddi participation has since fallen across most demographic groups, particularly among older and less affluent respondents. Cricket, by contrast, is skewing younger and more affluent: 26 per cent of the most affluent respondents now say they play it.
Badminton is the other bright spot. Women’s participation rose from 4 per cent to 6 per cent nationally, with Andhra Pradesh and Telangana seeing a threefold increase. In Punjab, where Tanvi Sharma has been winning on the international circuit, 11 per cent of women now say they play.
Half of India is watching women’s sport
The audiences are arriving in force. Fifty-one per cent of respondents said they had seen coverage of any women’s sport in the past six months, only 12 percentage points behind the equivalent figure for men’s sport. For live events, 43 per cent said they had watched a women’s match, against 54 per cent for men’s. In-person attendance tells a similar story: 29 per cent said they had attended a women’s game, just 8 points behind the 37 per cent who had attended a men’s match.
The Women’s Premier League is at the heart of this surge. Twenty-eight per cent of respondents said they watch the WPL, nearly double the 15 per cent who watched its predecessor, the Women’s T20 Challenge, in 2020. The gap to the men’s Indian Premier League is now just 6 percentage points: 34 per cent watch the IPL. The ICC Women’s World Cup, which India won at home in the autumn of 2025, clearly turbocharged interest: 36 per cent of current women’s sports viewers say they began following women’s sport less than six months ago.
Men, it turns out, are genuine converts. Nearly half, 47 per cent, of male respondents said they had watched a women’s sporting event in the past six months, and a third had attended one in person. Young men aged 15 to 24 are the most enthusiastic: six in ten consume any coverage of women’s sport. For context, 23 per cent of Americans follow women’s sport and 37 per cent of British viewers watched women’s live sport in 2025.
The primary motivation for watching has also shifted tellingly. In 2020, audiences said they watched women’s sport because they loved sport. By 2026, the top reason, cited by 54 per cent of viewers, is wanting to support the Indian team. Supporting an individual sportswoman was the second reason, up from 21 per cent to 33 per cent. Love of the game has been relegated to third.
Sania, Smriti and the power of the role model
The names that people reach for are revealing. When asked to name their favourite sportswoman of all time, respondents cited Sania Mirza, who retired in 2023, most often, at 9 per cent. Smriti Mandhana, the Indian cricket team’s vice-captain, was a close second at 8 per cent and the top choice among 18-to-24-year-olds. The favourite sportsman of all time, Virat Kohli, was named by 22 per cent: a gap that underlines how far women’s sport still has to travel in the public imagination, but also how quickly it is getting there.
The visibility is translating into career ambitions. One in six women, 17 per cent, now say they have considered sport as a profession, up 70 per cent on 2020. For women under 25, the figure is one in four. Tamil Nadu leads at 27 per cent, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Meghalaya at 19 per cent each. Nearly nine in ten parents say they would encourage their child, son or daughter equally, to pursue a sporting career, a gap that previously favoured sons but has now all but closed.
Support for equal prize money is overwhelming and rising. In 2020, 85 per cent agreed that men and women should receive equal prize money in Indian sport. That figure is now 89 per cent. India moved early: in 2022, the Board of Control for Cricket in India equalised match fees for international cricketers, making the country only the second, after New Zealand, to do so in cricket.
The barriers that stubbornly remain
None of this means the job is done. Overall sports participation has barely budged, up just one percentage point to 37 per cent since 2020. More than six in ten respondents still say they engage in no sport or physical activity at all. Urban participation has actually fallen by 4 percentage points; rural areas are gaining ground but from a lower base.
Time is the enemy that no policy can easily defeat. Two-thirds of non-participants, 65 per cent, cite lack of time as the reason they do not play sport, up sharply from 45 per cent in 2020. Among those in full-time work, the figure rises to 72 per cent; for men in full-time work, 74 per cent. India ranked 42nd out of 60 countries in the 2025 Global Work-Life Balance Index; a 2024-25 International Labour Organisation study identified it as one of the world’s most overworked nations, with more than half the population working 49 hours or more a week.
Safety is the barrier that most clearly divides women from men. Thirteen per cent of women who do not play sport cite safety concerns, equivalent to 32.7 million women across the states surveyed. The problem is worst where perceptions of sexual violence are most acute: in Tamil Nadu, 84 per cent of respondents think sexual violence against women has increased over the past decade, and 21 per cent of non-participating women there cite safety as a barrier. Bihar and Meghalaya, where fewer women perceive rising violence, have far lower safety-barrier figures.
Girls are also constrained by where they are permitted to play. Women who were active in childhood are far more likely than men to say they played predominantly at school, 37 per cent versus 26 per cent for men; men were more likely to play in neighbourhood spaces and informal settings. If school is the only arena open to girls, the pathway into adult recreational sport is narrow. Fewer women now cite a lack of school facilities as a barrier, down from 25 per cent in 2020 to 16 per cent, which suggests investment is working. But 10 per cent of young women aged 15 to 24 still report it, corresponding to 1.5 million young women across the states surveyed.
The stereotypes are getting worse, not better
Here the report delivers its most uncomfortable finding. Behaviours are changing; attitudes are not. The proportion of respondents agreeing that sportswomen should look attractive has risen from 37 per cent in 2020 to 46 per cent. Those who believe sportswomen have difficulty having children: up from 38 per cent to 44 per cent. Those who think women’s sport is less entertaining than men’s: up from 38 per cent to 43 per cent. Those who say sportswomen are not feminine enough: up from 37 per cent to 40 per cent. Those who believe sportswomen are simply not as good as sportsmen: up from 32 per cent to 38 per cent.
More troublingly still, women are more likely than men to agree that sportswomen should look attractive. And young respondents, the generation supposedly driving change, are more likely than older ones to say there is already too much coverage of women’s sport. Three in five respondents overall, 59 per cent, hold that view, up from 49 per cent in 2020.
Domestic attitudes are shifting in worrying directions too. Fifty-three per cent of respondents agree that a woman should tolerate violence in order to keep her family together, up from 51 per cent in 2020. Fifty-seven per cent believe a wife should obey her husband, up from 47 per cent. And 54 per cent still believe a woman’s place is at home, even as 84 per cent say they support women working outside it.
What the people behind the study say
Tim Awford, regional director for South Asia at BBC News, said it was encouraging to see that more Indian women were playing, following and watching sport compared with 2020. The BBC, he added, was proud to help raise the profile of sportswomen across its platforms and remained committed to telling their stories.
Rupa Jha, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Collective Newsroom, did not shy away from the contradictions. The findings showed both progress and continuing barriers, she said. While participation and viewership were rising fast, stereotypes and practical challenges remained. She hoped the data would prompt further discussion and action to support women athletes.
The broader picture: gender equality, slowly
The study situates sport within India’s wider gender story, and here too the picture is mixed. Ninety-seven per cent of respondents agreed that men and women should have equal rights. Seventy per cent said gender equality had improved over the past five years. Women’s financial independence is measurably growing: 73 per cent of women surveyed now hold a bank account, up from 62 per cent in 2020, and 89 per cent operate it themselves. The proportion of young women aged 15 to 24 who are already married has fallen from 42 per cent in 2020 to 32 per cent, a development that directly expands the time and mobility available to them for sport.
Childhood is being experienced differently too. In 2020, 36 per cent of women said they were restricted in childhood because they were girls; by 2026 that had fallen to 18 per cent. School sports facilities are more accessible: fewer than one in ten young women now cite their absence as a reason for not playing as a child, against one in four in 2020.
The 2036 Olympics and the window of opportunity
The report notes that India is bidding to host the 2036 Summer Olympics, a moment that could accelerate every trend this study has identified, or expose every weakness it has found. The momentum is real: cricket participation is soaring, the viewership gap to men’s sport is narrowing, young women are dreaming of sporting careers and parents are finally cheering them on equally. The infrastructure, school pitches, public parks, neighbourhood courts, is improving.
But 32.7 million women are still sitting out because they do not feel safe. Sixty-five per cent of non-participants say they have no time. Nearly half of all respondents think sportswomen must be physically attractive to deserve attention. And three in five Indians, including a striking proportion of the young women who are supposedly leading the revolution, say women’s sport is already getting too much coverage.
India has produced Manu Bhaker, the double Olympic medallist; a women’s cricket team that lifted the World Cup on home soil; a kabaddi team that won both the World Cup and the Asian Championship in 2025. The women are winning. The question is whether, off the field, the country is ready to let them.
Methodology: The survey was conducted by Kantar between 26 December 2025 and 30 January 2026. Researchers interviewed 10,304 people aged 15 and over face to face across 14 Indian states: Bihar, Odisha, Meghalaya, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. The sampling methodology was multistage stratified random sampling. Results were compared with an identical survey conducted in 2020. The margin of error at the total respondent level is 0.97 per cent at a 95 per cent confidence interval. The research was commissioned as an independent study by the BBC and Collective Newsroom. Fieldwork in Manipur was not conducted this year due to ongoing security concerns; Meghalaya replaced it in the sample.
