iWorld
Indian OTT audience: Young, urban and male-dominated
MUMBAI: India has seen a healthy growth of OTT audience in the last few years. Yet, brands and OTT service providers know very little about the demographics of their fast-increasing audience. How many are they in number, where do they exist, how do they watch, which genres of content do they prefer, are all important questions that can help in decision-making in the areas of content selection, target audience choice, media planning, market research and brand communication.
To fill this knowledge-gap, Ormax Media has released its OTT Audience Report: 2019, with a large sample size of 10,000 over the period of May-September 2019. The report puts the regular OTT (online video content) audience in India at 76.5 million. The study defined ‘regular OTT audience’ as someone who watched two or more hours of OTT content every week.
While the report confirms many of our perceptions about the Indian OTT audience, it also throws many new and interesting facets of its demographics.
The report finds that Mumbai and Delhi lead with 3 million regular OTT audience each, followed by Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Surat, Chennai, Pune & Jaipur.
Earlier in June, a study by Counterpoint Research found that tier I cities bring in 36 per cent of the audience and the top five metros account for 55 per cent of OTT users in the country.
The audience, however, is heavily male-dominated. As many as 66 per cent regular OTT audience are men while only 34 per cent are women. ALT Balaji’s GandiiBaat emerged as the most male-skewed show, while Amazon Prime Video’s Mind The Malhotras emerged as the most female-skewed show, the study finds.
The OTT audience, expectedly, is also young. Nearly 60 per cent of the regular OTT audience is below the age of 30, 21 per cent are in the age group of 31-40 and 20 per cent in the 41+ age group.
Among the OTT platforms, YouTube emerged as the most-preferred OTT brand, followed by Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar closely vying for the second position.
The report also highlights how solo consumption is still the dominant viewing behaviour seen in the OTT category, with 82 per cent audience typically watching online videos alone. Hindi emerges as the most preferred language of online video consumption at 62 per cent, followed by English at 22 per cent, while regional languages, led by Telugu and Tamil, control the balance 16 per cent share.
Speaking about The Ormax OTT Audience Report: 2019, Ormax Media CEO Shailesh Kapoor said: “OTT is an emerging and fast-growing category in India. While individual platforms have a lot of data on their own audience, there is little industry-wide understanding available on who the OTT audience in India exactly is, how many are they in number, where do they exist, how do they watch, which genres do they prefer, what are their subscription triggers, and many other such questions that are extremely relevant to any OTT business. This report, which will be an annual feature, answers many such questions in a manner that’s highly actionable.”
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
