Somewhere between the moment a viewer picks up the remote and the moment the show actually starts, a quiet war is being fought over their attention. It isn’t between two streaming apps competing for a subscription. It is between the television itself and the software running inside it. In India’s connected TV ecosystem, smart TV manufacturers and streaming platforms are no longer just business partners sharing the same screen. They are increasingly rivals, each trying to claim the same inventory, the same viewer, and the same advertising rupee.
Two Owners, One Screen
Every connected TV impression in India passes through two distinct layers of ownership. The first is the device layer, controlled by original equipment manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, TCL and the dozens of budget brands running Android TV or Google TV. This layer owns the home screen, the app launcher, the recommendation rail, and increasingly, ad slots that appear before a viewer has even opened an app. The second is the application layer, controlled by streaming platforms such as JioHotstar, YouTube, Zee5, SonyLIV and MX Player. This layer owns the in-content inventory: the pre-rolls, mid-rolls and pause screens that appear once a viewer has committed to a piece of content.
For years, these two layers coexisted without much friction. The OEM sold the hardware, the OTT platform sold the content and the ads within it, and nobody thought too hard about who owned the moments in between. That truce is unwinding. As smart TV margins shrink under intense price competition, hardware makers are treating advertising as a way to monetise a device long after the point of sale. A television that once generated revenue only once, at checkout, can now generate revenue every time its home screen is lit up.
Why OEMs Are Pushing Into Advertising
The economics are straightforward. Hardware manufacturing is a low-margin, high-volume business squeezed further every year by component costs and…