There is a peculiar irony at the heart of India’s Connected TV story. Brands are pouring money into the medium with a conviction rarely seen outside of a sports broadcaster selling IPL inventory, yet almost no one can tell you — with any real precision — how many unique people actually saw their ad. CTV advertising investments in India are estimated at between ₹2,300 crore and ₹3,000 crore, growing at up to 40% annually, and for many large brands the medium is no longer experimental inventory but a premium video layer embedded in annual planning cycles. The ambition is there. The budgets are moving. What is conspicuously absent is an honest answer to the most basic question in advertising: did it reach who you think it reached, and how many times? Call it the CTV paradox — a channel celebrated for its precision targeting that, in practice, cannot yet tell a brand what it actually bought. India’s measurement problem is not a data gap. It is a structural one, and it has been quietly undermining the credibility of one of the industry’s most exciting growth channels.
To understand why measurement has lagged so badly behind investment, you have to appreciate what makes CTV fundamentally different from the two worlds it sits between. Linear television in India has BARC — an imperfect but universally accepted currency that every channel, agency, and advertiser uses to price, plan, and evaluate. No BARC watermark, no BARC measurement. It is the one universal currency of Indian television advertising. Digital advertising, meanwhile, has its own stack of first-party platform data, third-party verification tools, and impression trackers that, for all their limitations, at least speak a common language. CTV falls awkwardly between these two worlds, inheriting the large-screen prestige of one and the data-driven promise of the other, while fully delivering on neither. As of early 2026, only platforms that have agreed to participate in BARC’s streaming measurement programme are measured — including JioHotstar, SonyLIV, Zee5, and a handful of smaller services, with YouTube’s inclusion remaining partial and contested. Platforms outside that framework are invisible to any unified planning system, which means a significant chunk of actual CTV consumption simply does not count. Add the reality that major CTV publishers use server-side ad insertion, YouTube uses Google’s own measurement stack, and Samsung Ads uses OEM-level data — meaning advertisers are rarely comparing like-for-like when stacking up numbers across platforms — and the picture becomes even murkier. As Russhabh R Thakkar, Founder and CEO of Frodoh, put it plainly: “CTV scale today is often overstated, largely because it is measured in silos.” It is a bit like trying to count the crowd at a concert by adding up ticket stubs from every door separately — you will always end up with more people than actually attended.
The deeper problem is that India’s broader measurement ecosystem was simply never built for the kind of audience fragmentation that CTV has accelerated. Television has BARC, print has IRS and ABC, radio has RAM, and digital platforms rely heavily on their own metrics — the result being duplicated audience counts, overlapping exposure, inefficient media allocation, and a poor understanding of how consumers actually move across screens and formats. CTV experienced 85% growth in penetration in India in 2025, with over 129 million users across 45 million households now owning connected TV sets — and yet the infrastructure tasked with measuring this explosion had spent years in a state of institutional inertia. BARC’s establishment survey, the foundational document upon which all panel-based television measurement rests, had remained pending for six years before the government finally stepped in with a mandate for annual surveys. The urgency was building globally too: over 32% of advertisers cite measurement as the biggest addressability challenge in CTV, and 70% say the lack of standardisation in CTV metadata is a key problem. Innovid’s 2025 benchmarks show the average CTV campaign reaching only 19.64% of households while already delivering an average frequency of 7.09 — a textbook case of the industry spending heavily to over-serve a fraction of the audience while the rest remains unmeasured and unreached. India was not an outlier in facing these problems. It was just further behind in confronting them.
The good news — and there is genuine, substantive good news here — is that 2026 has brought with it the first credible attempt to fix this at scale. BARC India and Nielsen have launched a cross-media measurement solution covering four screens — linear television, CTV, mobile, and computer/desktop — combining BARC’s linear viewership data with Nielsen ONE Ads’ digital measurement and a proprietary deduplication methodology. Nakul Chopra, CEO of BARC India, was unambiguous about the significance: “This marks a defining moment for cross-media ad measurement in India. BARC | Nielsen ONE Ads is the first-of-its-kind solution in India to bring together TV measurement along with digital screens, in a unified, deduplicated system. By combining scale, accountability and cross-screen insights, we are enabling advertisers to understand their true reach and incremental impact across the entire media ecosystem.” Akhil Parekh, Chief Product Officer at Nielsen, framed the advertiser relief even more directly: “They no longer have to stitch together data from multiple sources to understand how their campaigns are actually performing. A single, deduplicated view across all screens is something the industry needs.” JioHotstar has become the first premium platform to adopt the solution, beginning with the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup India & Sri Lanka 2026. Separately, TAM Sports has expanded its capabilities to track brand visibility and sponsorship across both broadcast and live streaming on CTV and mobile, addressing a gap that had made sports advertising planning particularly imprecise. The trajectory is clear: India is moving, however belatedly, toward a single measurement currency that can tell a brand exactly how many unique individuals it reached across every screen — without counting the same person twice. Whether this momentum extends beyond flagship platforms and premium sporting events to the wider CTV ecosystem is the critical question that the industry must now answer honestly. Madison has forecast large-screen adex to reach approximately ₹40,855 crore in 2026, with CTV alone expected to grow to around ₹8,000 crore even as linear TV remains flat — and at that scale, a measurement system that works for only a handful of publishers is not a solution. It is the beginning of one. The real test will be whether competitive interests fragment the very currency they are trying to build, or whether the industry finds the collective will to make unified measurement truly universal. The infrastructure is finally being assembled. What happens next depends entirely on the will of the people who profit from it.
