By Samir Karpe, Country Manager, DV India
And it’s no longer just the domain of urban and affluent India.
Penetration is accelerating well beyond metros into Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets, and today more than half of CTV viewers come from towns with populations under 1 million. This is a breakthrough moment for advertisers, reshaping how they can plan for scale.
DV's latest Global Insights Report, Must-CTV: Streaming's Shift from Promise to Performance, shows that Indian marketers increased their CTV spend 56% YOY, with 81% reporting that streaming campaigns outperform to campaign baselines. So why are so many brands still so hesitant to take full advantage of this prime moment in CTV’s evolution? The word you’ll often hear is “accountability.”
Inside many media organisations, CTV still lacks clear ownership. It often sits between the television, digital, and performance teams, borrowing expectations from each without being fully accountable to any one function. This ambiguity leads to fragmented planning, parallel buying paths, and inconsistent success metrics. When budgets grow faster than internal alignment, inefficiencies follow.
However, CTV is now too large and too visible to operate without accountability. In India, where CTV is still earning its place alongside linear television, trust will determine whether investment continues to accelerate or begins to plateau. And that trust will have to come from transparency around CTV ad inventory and content.
Providing that necessary transparency and accountability will require buy-in and participation from everyone. But when the industry becomes aligned around standards and expectations in programmatic CTV, advertisers across the board will truly benefit.
Let’s step back and explain how game-changing CTV’s recent wave of evolution is for advertisers and campaigns. The user experience appeal is obvious: premium video environments, lean-back attention, and the ability to combine television-scale storytelling with digital precision.
At the same time, viewing habits have matured to support campaign scale. Audiences increasingly subscribe to multiple platforms, switching fluidly between paid services and free, ad-supported environments. For brands, this has unlocked new reach and frequency opportunities, especially around long-form entertainment, regional programming, and live sports.
What’s more, CTV is no longer confined to upper-funnel awareness. It’s influencing consideration, engagement, and cross-device behaviour.
But as CTV moves from test budgets to core media plans, it is also revealing structural gaps across the ecosystem.
Advertisers invest in CTV with the expectation that their ads will run alongside professionally produced, brand-suitable content on television screens. That expectation underpins premium pricing and justifies shifting budgets away from traditional TV.
In reality, not all inventory labelled as CTV delivers the same experience. As programmatic buying scales, ads can appear across a mix of environments that range from high-quality long-form programming to low-quality or off-screen placements that simply resemble video. Research shows that 34% of CTV video ads ran outside of streaming TV content — contributing to an estimated $4 billion in annual advertiser losses.
Without consistent definitions and verification, advertisers risk paying premium rates for impressions that do not meet premium standards.
But verification, standardisation, and the ability to measure reach and performance are all stymied by fragmented data – a symptom of buying across fragmented platforms. Key data for effective CTV reach and measurement remains controlled by platforms themselves. This lack of visibility creates buyer hesitation, especially as brands look to move more upper-funnel spend into streaming.
As CTV matures, advertisers are no longer satisfied with knowing which app delivered an impression. They want to understand the content environments where their ads appear. And 74% of marketers in India say they require show-level transparency in order to justify a streaming investment.
This shift in thinking reflects a broader change in how video is evaluated and even transacted. Without visibility into programme type, genre, or episode context, the full potential of streaming as a performance medium is blunted. Advertisers struggle to link exposure to outcomes or manage brand suitability effectively. This matters deeply in India’s content-rich ecosystem. Regional entertainment, news, films, and live sports all create very different viewing contexts and brand associations. Treating all CTV impressions as equal ignores how audiences engage and how brands are perceived.
Advertisers and agencies can’t solve this complexity and opacity on their own. India’s CTV ecosystem spans global streaming platforms, local OTT players, broadcasters, device manufacturers, and programmatic intermediaries. Each controls part of the value chain. No single participant can solve transparency, measurement, or quality standards alone. Collaboration is key to delivering on the full promise of CTV, and the streaming platforms that are willing and able to collaborate will win the bigger ad budgets.
Platforms that can support deeper content-level understanding will be better positioned to attract sustained advertiser investment. Those that cannot risk being deprioritised as buyers demand greater accountability.
To unlock CTV’s full potential, the industry must act decisively on three fronts.
Marketers need to establish clear internal ownership models that treat CTV as a full-funnel medium with shared accountability, not a channel caught between teams.
Advertisers must demand greater transparency around where ads run, how they are delivered, and what viewers actually see. Premium investment should come with premium confidence.
The ecosystem must collaborate on common standards that protect quality, improve measurement, and build trust across the supply chain.
CTV has earned its place in India’s media mix. The next chapter will be defined not by how fast the channel grows, but by how responsibly it scales. The discussions about accountability and transparency that industry leaders begin today, and the partnerships they forge as a result, will determine whether CTV becomes a sustainable engine of value or another line item.