Cricket, comedy and Ranveer Singh: what India actually streamed in the first half of 2026

MUMBAI: For years, working out what India actually watches on streaming has been a bit like reading tea leaves. Platforms trumpet “views” and “hours watched” on their own terms, with no common yardstick and even less candour. Ormax Media, a research outfit with 18 years of previous, has now stepped into the breach. Its new tracker, Ormax StreamView, launched in January, measures unduplicated viewers (people who watched at least 30 minutes) across originals, GEC soaps, theatrical films, sport and news, with reels and shorts excluded. The result, released as “The India OTT Watchlist” for January-June 2026, is the closest thing yet to a proper scoreboard. And what a scoreboard it is.

Cricket remains the undisputed heavyweight

No surprises at the top: the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup drew 246mn unduplicated viewers on JioHotstar, comfortably the biggest draw of the half-year, with the Indian Premier League close behind on 228.4mn. Between them, the two properties reached nearly half a billion eyeballs, a reminder that in India, cricket is not so much content as infrastructure. Six of the top 16 properties nationwide were cricket tournaments, spanning men’s, women’s and bilateral cricket alike. JioHotstar owns this turf almost entirely, underlining how sports rights have become the platform’s moat.

But the real story is what beat everything except cricket

Third on the overall list, ahead of every film and web series released this half, sat “India’s Got Latent” season two, on a projected 38.5mn viewers, a startling number for a show that lives natively on YouTube (fronted by comedian Samay Raina) before finding a second life on Netflix. Raina also landed his stand-up special “Still Alive” at fifteenth place on 13.1mn. Between the two, one YouTuber turned mogul out-drew nearly every big-budget Bollywood release of the period. That is a proper changing of the guard moment for Indian entertainment, and a bracing one for legacy studios watching a creator-led format eat their lunch.

Ranveer Singh had himself a half-year

“Dhurandhar” topped the films chart on 35.2mn viewers, and its follow-up “Dhurandhar: The Revenge” landed second on a projected 27.8mn, making Singh’s spy thriller universe the most-watched Hindi cinematic property of the period by some distance, ahead of starrier ensemble comedies and war dramas alike. Akshay Kumar’s horror comedy “Bhooth Bangla” and Emraan Hashmi’s courtroom drama “Haq” rounded out a healthy top ten for Hindi film, spread neatly across Netflix and JioHotstar.

Reality television is thriving, not dying

Sceptics who assumed talent shows and celebrity antics were fading before scripted drama got a rude awakening. “Laughter Chefs” season three, “The 50” and “The Great Indian Kapil Show” season four all cracked the top 25 nationally, while “Splitsvilla X6” and “Indian Idol” season sixteen kept the format’s older stalwarts firmly in the conversation. Unscripted television, it turns out, remains India’s comfort food.

GEC soaps prove the old guard still has legs

“Naagin” season seven and the eternal “Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah” both cracked the overall top 25, the latter now thriving as a YouTube and Sony LIV hybrid rather than a pure television property, proof that decades-old formats can find fresh audiences simply by meeting viewers where they already are.

The regional and international story is more modest, but promising

Telugu’s “The RajaSaab” led non-Hindi cinema on 17.5mn, with Malayalam thrillers “Dridam” and “Vaazha 2” not far behind, a solid showing for southern cinema on a national platform. International fare stayed a niche pursuit by comparison: even “The Boys” season five and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” topped out around 7 to 8mn, a fraction of what a mid-table Hindi film manages. That gap is not a weakness; it is simply evidence of how deep and self-sufficient India’s own content ecosystem has become.

The upshot

Six months of hard numbers confirm what industry insiders long suspected but could never quite prove: Indian streaming is not a story of Netflix originals conquering all, nor of Bollywood stars carrying every hit. It is a wonderfully messy hybrid of cricket, comedians turned broadcasters, franchise thrillers and soap operas that refuse to die, all coexisting, all thriving, on the same platforms. If Ormax StreamView keeps this cadence up, the guessing games that have long bedevilled Indian OTT economics may finally be over. For an industry that has spent a decade arguing about numbers nobody could verify, that is very good news indeed.