Mumbai: India’s media and entertainment landscape is undergoing a profound realignment, one that is structural rather than cyclical. Chrome OTT’s comprehensive whitepaper, “From Linear to Logarithmic,” captures this moment of transition with rigorous data, layered charts, and behavioural insights that reveal the contours of a rapidly evolving attention economy. The section titled “Key Industry Trends: Digital Surges, Linear Stabilizes” is particularly significant because it traces three fundamental forces that are redrawing the boundaries of consumption, advertising, and power dynamics in India’s media market.
Digital AdEx Crosses a Threshold — and Redraws the Market
The most consequential shift is the clear takeover of advertising expenditure by digital. The whitepaper’s comparative spend graph on page 4 makes this explicit: Digital AdEx has crossed ₹900 billion, far ahead of Linear TV’s ₹670 billion. This is not a marginal difference; it is a distinct separation that signifies a phase change. Unlike earlier years when digital appeared to be catching up gradually, the latest chart reflects an unmistakable slope that indicates digital has now entered a stage of exponential scaling. This divide is not expected to narrow; the report describes it as an irreversible trend.
The reason lies in the nature of digital’s expansion. OTT platforms — especially YouTube, which remains the gravitational centre of Indian video consumption — have created effectively endless advertising inventory. Digital systems, unlike linear, are not constrained by time-bands or fixed commercial minutes. They expand elastically, guided by algorithmic optimisation and backed by granular audience data. Brands shifting budgets are not doing so purely because audiences are migrating, but because the entire architecture of advertising has moved toward outcome-led models. Digital provides measurable funnels, real-time bidding, creator-led pathways, and vernacular targeting at scale, making it a medium that is not just growing in consumption but transforming marketing logic itself. The report makes clear that digital is not winning by default; it is winning because of structural advantages that linear cannot replicate in its existing form.
The Hybrid Reality: Linear TV Holds Its Cultural and Regional Ground
Yet, in parallel to digital’s surge, Chrome OTT’s visual consumption maps and distribution charts paint a contrasting picture of stability within traditional television. Contrary to the rhetoric that linear TV is collapsing, the data reveals a medium that continues to command relevance — especially in rural and regional markets. Linear’s footprint remains strongest in Bharat, where household-level reception, Free Dish penetration, and television ownership ensure a consistent flow of viewers who continue to prefer traditional programming formats.
This stabilisation is not accidental. Linear TV is deeply entrenched in India’s cultural routines. Family co-viewing, habitual prime-time serials, religious broadcasts, regional news bulletins, and cricket remain formats where linear is unmatched. The whitepaper’s genre time-spent visuals illustrate that these content types still command stickiness that digital platforms cannot easily duplicate. While urban Gen-Zs and metro millennials increasingly favour personalised feeds and multi-screen consumption, India’s vast non-metro audience retains a stable relationship with the television set.
This creates a hybrid environment where digital drives immediacy, personalisation, and performance metrics, while linear sustains broad cultural reach, emotional credibility, and regional dominance. As the report suggests, linear is transitioning from India’s “default screen” to a “specialist screen” — indispensable for moments of mass appointment viewing even as digital becomes the primary everyday medium. Rather than one replacing the other, India’s media future is defined by coexistence, with advertisers compelled to adopt cross-media planning to achieve both depth and scale.
The GAMA Dependency: A Growing Threat to India’s Media Sovereignty
The whitepaper’s most unsettling insight surfaces in the later sections, where charts illustrate the rising dependence of Indian publishers on global digital platforms — particularly Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple. A pie chart showing revenue distribution reveals that more than 30% of the Indian news industry’s earnings now come from YouTube alone. This concentration is not just financially imbalanced; it poses a long-term threat to the autonomy of India’s media ecosystem.
The report’s graphs tracking volatility in publisher revenues underline how algorithmic changes — often sudden, opaque, and unregulated — can dramatically alter viewership and monetisation outcomes for local media companies. Indian publishers increasingly find themselves vulnerable to platform-driven dynamics where discoverability, content distribution, and monetisation are shaped not by editorial judgment or audience loyalty but by machine-led recommendation systems.
The imbalance is further amplified by the revenue-share data visualised in the whitepaper, which shows global platforms capturing a disproportionately large portion of advertising value even though they do not create the content themselves. This raises concerns about revenue equity, bargaining power, and long-term sustainability for Indian media organisations. The whitepaper argues that if the dependency continues deepening, India risks ceding too much control of its digital information architecture to entities that are not locally regulated.
A Converged Market with Diverging Risks
Taken together, the insights from the whitepaper’s second section describe a market that is converging in consumption but diverging in power and economics. Digital’s rise is rapid and irreversible. Linear’s stability is anchored in cultural continuity and regional strength. But the dominance of global platforms introduces structural vulnerabilities that cannot be ignored.
The future the Chrome OTT report outlines is one where India’s media landscape must evolve on multiple fronts simultaneously. Platform dependence must be balanced with stronger domestic ecosystems. Linear must innovate to retain relevance even as digital scales exponentially. And advertisers must embrace a unified, hybrid worldview where both mediums serve fundamentally different but equally important roles.
India is not moving from linear to digital; it is moving into a converged era where the real challenge is negotiating value, sovereignty, and sustainability in a market increasingly shaped by algorithms, global platforms, and shifting audience behaviours.
