By Arjit Sachdeva.
The streaming industry has had an extraordinary decade. Not long ago, the conversation revolved around getting audiences to move away from traditional television. Today, streaming has become the default screen for millions. India now has over 600 million OTT viewers, while CTV adoption continues to gather pace, growing by 87% year-on-year. Digital advertising, too, is riding on this wave with immense momentum.
To get here, streaming platforms invested relentlessly in premium content, intuitive interfaces, regional storytelling, live sports, and deep personalization. They also built robust advertising businesses by introducing ad-supported models (AVOD) that allowed brands to reach audiences at scale. This first phase of OTT monetisation has been remarkably successful where the focus was on adding premium and more inventory.
The next phase of growth, however, will demand a different mindset. It will increasingly depend on how do platforms create more value from every advertising opportunity instead of simply creating more advertising opportunities?
From Growing Inventory to Growing Yield
As audiences expanded, increasing ad inventory was the natural path forward. More viewers meant more impressions. More impressions meant more opportunities for brands to participate. That strategy helped establish OTT as one of the most attractive advertising environments in the country. Every industry reaches a point where scale alone stops being the primary growth lever.
Airlines stop measuring success by the number of flights they operate and start optimising revenue per seat. Hotels don’t just add more rooms; they improve revenue per available room.
Streaming is reaching a similar inflection point. Adding more ad breaks may create more impressions in the short term, but it also comes at a cost. Industry data shows that increasing ad loads beyond a threshold…