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Kevin Vaz opens FICCI-EY report with a declaration: India’s M&E industry set to breach Rs 3 trillion mark by 2027
In a keynote address at the FICCI-EY report launch, Kevin Vaz says sport, AI and the connected TV boom are driving a multi-screen revolution with no signs of slowing
MUMBAI: India’s media and entertainment industry is growing faster than the economy, reshaping global benchmarks and is on course to blow past Rs 3 trillion by 2027. That was the headline message from Kevin Vaz, chairman of the FICCI Media and Entertainment Committee and chief executive of entertainment at JioStar, who delivered the opening keynote at the launch of the FICCI-EY Media and Entertainment Report 2026 in Mumbai on Monday. He did not waste much time on caveats.
The industry hit Rs 2.78 trillion in 2025, outpacing GDP per capita growth and surpassing even last year’s bullish forecasts. Vaz described the year in three words: scale, convergence, transformation. The numbers, he suggested, were only half the story. The other half was how that growth was happening.
Digital has become the industry’s largest segment, driven by advertising, subscriptions and commerce. But Vaz was quick to puncture the familiar narrative of digital killing everything else. India, he argued, is not an either-or market. It is an AND market. Connected TV is surging. Linear television, mobile, films and print are all still expanding. AVGC, the animation, visual effects, gaming and comics sector, is emerging as a serious growth engine, opening new storytelling formats and new global revenue streams. Nothing, he said, is replacing anything. Everything is reinforcing everything else.
Nowhere is that more vivid than in sport. In an on-demand world where audiences can watch anything, anytime, Indians still show up live. “Sports don’t fragment audiences,” Vaz said. “They unite them, just on different screens.” The ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 made the point emphatically. During the final, JioHotstar delivered 72.5 million concurrent streams, a global record. Group chats exploded. Families renegotiated control of the television. Advertisers, Vaz noted with undisguised relish, stopped asking where audiences were and started asking how fast they could get in.
Cinema had its own landmark year. More than 1,900 films were released, with several crossing the Rs 1 billion mark. Dhurandhar was singled out as proof that Indian audiences will still turn up in large numbers for content that grips them. Live experiences, too, are getting bigger and more immersive, though Vaz suggested the surface has barely been scratched.
Then there is artificial intelligence, which he described as quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, reshaping everything. AI is enabling personalisation, efficiency and scale, but Vaz argued its deeper significance lies in what it is doing to creativity itself. He pointed to Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh, billed as the world’s first AI-produced show, as evidence that the technology can amplify creative ambition rather than hollow it out. He also used the platform to call on Indian policymakers to engage seriously with the creative industry on AI and copyright, ensuring that creators are fairly compensated as the technology spreads.
The picture that emerges from the report, and from Vaz’s keynote, is of an industry that has stopped thinking of itself as a fast-growing emerging market and started thinking of itself as a global template. Scale, diversity and innovation, he said, are no longer in tension in India. They are coexisting, and the rest of the world is taking notes.
The Rs 3 trillion milestone is two years away. As the man who chairs the committee that shapes the industry’s policy agenda and runs the country’s most powerful entertainment platform, Vaz set the tone for the day with characteristic directness: India’s media business is not just chasing growth. It is deciding what the country talks about at dinner. That is a different kind of power altogether.
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JioStar study with BARC and Nielsen finds TV and digital ads reach different audiences during T20 World Cup
JioStar’s T20 World Cup data shows cross-screen duplication below 10 per cent, setting the stage for a blockbuster IPL
MUMBAI: The numbers are in, and they are striking. During the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026, television and digital advertising campaigns barely stepped on each other’s toes. Cross-screen audience duplication stayed below 10 per cent across every participating campaign, a finding that upends the assumption that brands paying for both screens are largely paying twice to reach the same eyeballs.
JioStar, the media giant that broadcast the tournament across television and digital platforms, on Tuesday unveiled the findings from BARC | Nielsen One Ads, a cross-screen measurement solution deployed for the first time at scale during the World Cup. The verdict: TV and digital are not cannibalising each other. They are reaching fundamentally different people.
The study found that digital platforms are delivering genuinely incremental audiences, viewers who would not have been reached on television alone, while enabling more precise targeting across devices. The combined effect gives advertisers what the industry has long craved: a unified, deduplicated four-screen audience that marries the blunt-instrument scale of television with the surgical precision of digital.
“The ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 has once again demonstrated the power of scale in live sports, and these findings take it a step further by quantifying how that scale translates across screens,” said Anup Govindan, head of sales, sports, JioStar. “With less than 10 per cent duplication, we now have clear, measurable evidence of how integrated planning delivers both efficiency and impact for advertisers. As we look ahead to IPL 2026, this sets a strong foundation for brands to plan with greater confidence, leveraging cross-screen strategies to maximise reach and effectiveness at scale.”
The methodology behind the findings stitches together two measurement giants. BARC India supplies linear television data; Nielsen brings its digital measurement capabilities across connected TV, mobile and desktop. The result is a single, deduplicated view of campaign reach and frequency, the kind of unified currency that advertisers have been demanding as audiences scatter across screens.
The timing is deliberate. As consumption habits splinter, viewers flicking between the living-room set, the smartphone on the sofa and the laptop at the kitchen table, the case for unified measurement has grown urgent. A brand buying a 30-second slot on Star Sports and a pre-roll on JioCinema can now know, with some rigour, whether those two buys are actually compounding their reach or merely doubling their spend.
JioStar, BARC India and Nielsen say the learnings will directly inform cross-screen strategies for upcoming tentpole events. IPL 2026 is next. If the World Cup data holds, and there is little reason to think it will not, brands that treat television and digital as a single, coordinated buy rather than two separate line items will arrive at the auction with a sharper pencil and a cleaner brief. In India’s ferociously competitive advertising market, that edge is everything.
