A tenth of Indian television households have internet enabled TVs

A tenth of Indian television households, or 20-22 million homes, in India have internet-enabled connected televisions (CTVs) today and brands are estimated to increase their CTV advertising spends from $86 million in 2023 to $395 million by 2027, according to a GroupM-Kantar report released at the ‘Addressable TV and Beyond’ summit hosted by GroupM’s Finecast in Mumbai on Wednesday.

While linear TV includes cable and DTH, CTV is connected to the Internet either through streaming devices such as Firestick, smart TVs, set top boxes or OTT apps. This new category opens up advertising avenues for brands as they can reach their target audiences through a combination of both linear and connected TV.

Speaking about the revolution television has undergone from to cable and DTH to sports broadcasting and global content, GroupM South Asia CEO Prasanth Kumar said, “Many new capabilities exist for TV advertisers in the coming years…India is set to become the third largest TV market in the next three years.”

With about 210 television households, India’s TV penetration stands at nearly 70 per cent and so there is still room for growth, GroupM estimates.

This 47% CAGR growth in CTV ad spends over five years is expected to come as addressable CTV households are growing driven by an increase in content on OTT apps, smart TV sales and broadband connections, noted the ‘The Changing Landscape of Indian Television’ report.

Although TV ad spending in India is expected to grow at a much slower rate than before due to competition from digital platforms, its estimated CAGR growth of 11.8% between 2023 and 2027 is still stronger than the global average of 1.1% and APAC’s 3.7%. With this, India is expected to be the third largest TV advertising market by 2024.

“Research shows that overall TV delivered the highest levels of active attention and OTT delivered 20% more active attention than the linear environment,” said Finecast’s Global CEO Nicola Lewis in a recorded video message at the event. She added that brands will have more opportunities as premium OTT platforms like Netflix introduce ads on their platform.

“We are always looking for ways to connect to the consumers and that’s where the consumer is going. But the numbers are still low on connected TV. While we are doing testing now, it is still in nascent stages, pretty much like when payments started out on digital,” said Anjali (Krishnan) Madan, Director Consumer Experience, Mondelez at one of the panel discussions. She added that there aren’t enough audience insights from connected TVs to do personalisation, an essential exercise for brands today. “It’s only when we get to scale that will we start looking at how audiences can be divided into cohorts, etc. That’s the trade-off currently.”

“There is no one medium for TV consumption today. That’s a challenge we have. TV gets consumed in so any different ways and each one comes with its own measurement metrics. How do we bring about unified measurement of TV consumption,” said Airtel Ads Head of Business Vignesh Narayanan, in the panel discussion. Business Today