India’s Connected-TV Push Is Becoming a Fight for the Living Room, Not Just Another Streaming Metric

Connected TV is often discussed as a distribution change: television content, delivered through internet-connected screens. The more consequential shift may be what happens before a show is ever made. At a Mumbai industry gathering, leaders from Prime Video, JioStar, Sony Pictures Networks India, NDTV and Zee described a market in which the living-room screen is affecting decisions about story format, audience targeting, advertising and even whether a niche programme gets made.

The central idea is simple enough: streaming is no longer assumed to be a solitary, phone-or-laptop activity. Gaurav Gandhi, Prime Video’s Asia-Pacific and Australia-New Zealand chief, said the service is increasingly considering whether a project is built primarily for co-viewing or for an individual viewer. That is a meaningful editorial distinction. A programme intended for a room full of people has different pressures from one selected by a single person with headphones on: it has to be easy to enter, easy to agree on and worth keeping on when the group has many alternatives.

That does not mean every connected-TV show must become broad, family-only entertainment. The panel’s wider argument was more nuanced. The large screen can restore a shared experience while internet delivery can make programming more personally relevant. The opportunity is in balancing those two things rather than treating them as opposing forces.

What connected TV means in this conversation

Connected TV, often shortened to CTV, refers here to TV viewing on a screen connected to the internet. It matters because it combines elements traditionally associated with television—size, distance viewing and a relaxed “lean-back” posture—with features associated with digital platforms, including on-demand selection, measurement and more specific advertising delivery.

“Lean-back” is industry shorthand for viewing that asks little from the audience beyond choosing something and settling in. It contrasts with a more active, “lean-forward” experience, where a person searches, scrolls, clicks and continually manages what comes next. The distinction may sound cosmetic, but it goes to the heart of the discovery problem Gandhi identified. A catalogue can offer vast choice, yet too much choice can make a lean-back session harder rather than better. When several people are waiting for something to start, browsing friction becomes especially costly.

That is why recommendation systems are moving closer to the centre of the argument. A recommendation engine is the system that decides which titles, channels or programmes to surface to a viewer. Gandhi said those systems need to improve. The practical issue is not merely helping someone find a title they already know. It is helping viewers reach something suitable quickly enough that the abundance of options does not become the experience.

For a co-viewing household, “suitable” can be a more demanding calculation than it is for an individual. A person may know exactly what they want to watch. A group may need a programme that crosses age, taste and attention differences. The panel did not lay out a universal solution, but it did make clear that discovery is now tied to creative strategy. If audiences arrive on the large screen for shared viewing, services have reason to think about what kinds of stories can create that common choice.

The screen still matters, even when the signal changes

Kevin Vaz, JioStar’s entertainment CEO and chair of the FICCI Media & Entertainment Committee, pushed back slightly on framing the subject as CTV alone. His preference was to focus on the large screen itself. His point was that television’s social role did not disappear simply because delivery technology changed: the big screen remains a place where families gather and watch together.

Gaurav Banerjee, managing director and CEO of Sony Pictures Networks India, made a related case. He cautioned against being overly absorbed by the delivery mechanism and urged attention to what people actually do once they reach the large-screen experience. For him, the durable value is a programme that gives a family something to discuss afterwards. He recalled watching Nukkad with his family in the 1980s, using that memory to argue that communal viewing remains something the industry should preserve and keep creating.

There is an important distinction in these remarks. The executives are not presenting the living room as a relic being rescued from digital viewing. They are describing an internet-enabled version of it. The form changes—more choice, on-demand access and more data—but the hoped-for outcome is familiar: a programme becoming part of a shared routine or a shared conversation.

That approach also explains why the CTV discussion is not neatly reducible to “TV versus digital.” Punit Goenka, CEO of Zee Entertainment Enterprises, characterized the current environment as an attention economy where content, technology and data must operate together. His concise warning was that an unlimited volume of content does not produce unlimited audience consumption. In other words, the real constraint is time and attention, not the theoretical number of available titles.

Advertising’s appeal: scale with addressability

The business case is as central as the creative one. Vivek Couto of Media Partners Asia described CTV as combining television-scale reach with digital addressability. Addressability means advertisers can aim messages at particular audience segments instead of placing one identical message in front of everyone reached by a broad channel or programme.

Vaz said the large screen keeps its appeal for advertisers while connected delivery adds measurement and the ability to target messages more specifically. He cited an audience figure presented earlier in the session: India’s CTV audience was put at nearly 200 million viewers and described as growing quickly.

The distinction matters because traditional television’s broad reach and digital advertising’s targeting have often been treated as different propositions. CTV is being positioned as a way to pursue both at once: advertising on a screen that commands attention in a shared environment, but with more information about which audiences are being reached. The panel did not offer a full account of how measurement is standardized or how advertisers compare results across services, so those operational details remain outside the discussion. Still, the stated direction is clear: data is meant to help turn a big-screen audience into a more precisely sellable audience.

For viewers, there is a trade-off embedded in that model. Better targeting may make advertising more relevant to a chosen audience, while the same systems are also part of how platforms decide what to recommend and how to organize an enormous library. The panel focused on the industry opportunity rather than setting out consumer safeguards or platform rules. That is worth keeping separate from the core claim: the technology provides capabilities; how companies choose to apply them is a business and editorial decision.

Why niche news can find room outside a fixed schedule

The most concrete example of changed programming economics came from Rahul Kanwal, CEO and editor-in-chief of NDTV. He said a conventional linear news schedule creates anxiety around narrow-interest programming. A planner has to consider whether a specialised show will drag down the overall channel rating at the particular time it airs.

Connected TV changes that calculation because viewers can choose a programme specifically because they are interested in it. Kanwal said NDTV has leaned into Lifeline, focused on healthcare, wellness and anti-aging, and Launchpad, focused on upskilling. His argument was not that these subjects suddenly become mass-appeal linear hits. It was that they can work when their audience can actively seek them out instead of encountering them as a compulsory part of a fixed channel schedule.

Linear television means programming arranged on a timetable: a viewer tunes in at a set time and receives whatever is scheduled. On-demand connected viewing does not eliminate scheduled programming, but it makes a different model possible. A specialist title can have value even if it would not be the best use of a broadly programmed channel slot.

That is one of the more significant implications in the discussion. Big-screen co-viewing and personalized selection might initially sound like contradictory goals—one implies a common audience, the other fragmentation. The news example shows how they can coexist. Some content can be designed to create a large communal moment. Other content can be available to a smaller but highly interested audience without being punished by the economics of a general-purpose schedule.

A hit is no longer one number

Vaz also argued that the definition of a successful programme has expanded. In an earlier single-screen framework, a hit could be assessed through one primary large-screen measure. With audiences now spread across multiple screens and services, he said success also involves audience voting, engagement and social-media trends.

This is not a claim that every metric means the same thing. Ratings, participation, engagement and online conversation measure different behaviors. But together they reflect a changed reality: a title may connect strongly with a particular audience even if it does not appear dominant in one older, broad measure. Vaz’s formulation—one viewer’s flop can be another’s hit—captures the commercial logic behind more precise matching of stories to viewers.

The risk, of course, is mistaking measurement abundance for clarity. More signals can give companies more evidence, but they can also create competing definitions of success. The panel’s answer was not to elevate any single number. It was to emphasize matching: using technology to connect a story with the audience likely to value it, at the time and on the screen that suits that audience.

What this means for entertainment makers and audiences

For creators and commissioners, the immediate question is not whether all work must be designed for families. It is whether the intended viewing context is being considered early enough. Is the programme meant to hold a room? Is it something a viewer seeks out for a particular interest? Does it need a simple entry point for a shared, relaxed session? Those are programming questions shaped by the capabilities and habits of connected screens.

For news organizations, the case made by NDTV suggests a route for subjects that do not fit the unforgiving rhythm of a general linear schedule. And for advertisers, CTV’s promise is the combination described by Vaz and Couto: access to a large screen alongside more targeted delivery and measurement.

For audiences, the benefit depends heavily on whether discovery improves. The industry’s catalogue has become larger, but Goenka’s observation remains the limiting principle: people cannot consume endlessly. A better connected-TV experience, by the logic voiced in Mumbai, is not one that simply offers more tiles to scroll through. It is one that reduces the work of choosing, makes niche interests easier to serve and still leaves room for the programmes households decide to watch together.

That leaves the large screen in a surprisingly familiar position. It is still a social object in the home. What has changed is the infrastructure around it: the system can know more, offer more and target more. Whether that creates better television will depend less on the label attached to the screen than on the stories audiences can find—and want to share once they do.

For a related view of how major entertainment and technology companies are recalibrating their public-platform presence, see Sony’s decision to skip CES 2027.