Cricket rules as OTT widens its playbook in India, says Ormax report

MUMBAI: The remote may have no favourites, but Indian viewers certainly do. While cricket continues to bat on a different pitch altogether, the country’s OTT audience is increasingly hopping between films, web series, reality shows and even television content, signalling a far broader streaming appetite than ever before.

That is the key takeaway from Ormax Media’s first-ever India OTT Watchlist, powered by its newly launched Ormax StreamView (OSV) measurement framework, which tracks what India watched across OTT platforms between January and June 2026. Unlike earlier trackers focused primarily on OTT originals, OSV measures long-form content spanning originals, theatrical films, GEC programming, sports, news and non-fiction, reflecting the increasingly diverse nature of streaming consumption in India.

Unsurprisingly, live sport dominated the charts. The ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 emerged as the most-watched OTT property in India with an estimated 246 million viewers, followed by the Indian Premier League 2026 with 228.4 million viewers. Cricket’s dominance continued further down the rankings, with the India vs New Zealand series drawing 30.5 million viewers and the India vs Afghanistan series attracting 13.7 million, while the Women’s Premier League 2026 and ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2026 also featured among the country’s biggest streaming properties.

Beyond cricket, entertainment proved it could still steal plenty of screen time. India’s Got Latent Season 2 emerged as the biggest reality show on OTT with a projected 38.5 million viewers, making it the third most-watched property overall. Among films, Dhurandhar led the pack with 35.2 million viewers across Netflix and JioHotstar, while Dhurandhar: The Revenge followed with a projected 27.8 million viewers.

In the web series category, Made In India: A Titan Story topped the charts with a projected 17.8 million viewers on Amazon MX Player, ahead of Chiraiya (16.3 million) on JioHotstar and Taskaree: The Smuggler’s Web (14.2 million) on Netflix. Other strong performers included Thukra Ke Mera Pyaar S2, Matka King, Gram Chikitsalay S2, Aspirants S3, Inspector Avinash S2 and Raakh, highlighting intense competition across streaming platforms.

The report also underlined how traditional television content continues to find fresh audiences online. Naagin Season 7 led the Hindi GEC fiction category with 11.9 million viewers, followed by Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah (10.6 million) and Anupama (8.8 million), demonstrating that appointment viewing is increasingly shifting to streaming.

Ormax said the new StreamView framework is based on weekly primary research involving more than 3,000 respondents, combining online surveys with a dedicated audience panel. Viewership estimates represent the number of individuals who watched a property for at least 30 minutes, with audiences counted only once irrespective of multiple viewing sessions. The framework covers all language versions available in India but excludes overseas audiences and short-form content such as reels, trailers and music videos.

The inaugural watchlist paints a clear picture of India’s evolving OTT landscape: cricket may remain the undisputed blockbuster, but audiences are increasingly spreading their watch time across genres, languages and platforms, making streaming more diverse than ever before.