India’s OTT Market Hits 601 Million Users, But Only 119 Million Pay: Monetisation Gap Widens

Mumbai: India’s OTT ecosystem continues to expand at scale, but a widening monetisation gap is emerging as the industry’s biggest structural challenge. Despite a massive base of 601 million OTT users, only 119 million are active paying subscribers, underscoring a deep imbalance between consumption and revenue generation. That ratio — roughly one paying viewer for every four who watch free — is the number every boardroom in Mumbai, Singapore, and Los Angeles is quietly wrestling with.

According to the latest South Asia OTT market projections by Muvi, a new market projection report covering India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka for the period 2026–2030, the region’s streaming revenue is expected to grow from $4.96 billion in 2026 to $6.76 billion by 2030, while India alone is projected to scale from $13 billion to $23.9 billion over the same period. The numbers are staggering in scale, sobering in implication.

A market that defies easy categorisation

India’s streaming story begins, as most Indian economic stories do, with sheer demographic weight. The country now has 806 million active internet users, ranking second globally behind only China. Cheaper data plans — Jio’s 2016 disruption still reverberating a decade later — have compressed the cost of mobile data to among the lowest in the world. Smartphones are owned by 97.4% of all internet users, with almost universal smartphone penetration among that base.

The OTT audience universe — defined as anyone who watched digital video at least once in the preceding month — now stands at 601 million people, or 41% of India’s population, up from 37% a year earlier. That 9.9% year-on-year growth, while slightly slower than the 13%-plus rates of 2023 and 2024, still represents tens of millions of first-time digital video consumers entering the market annually.

Smart TV ownership, at 40.5% of internet users as of Q3 2024, is reshaping the consumption profile. The India smart TV market was valued at USD 9.88 billion in 2022 and is expanding at a 16.7% CAGR through 2030, driven by rising disposable incomes and aggressive discounting by brands. This hardware shift matters because it bifurcates the OTT audience in ways that raw user counts obscure: a Smart TV viewer commands significantly higher advertising rates than a smartphone viewer watching the same content.

Revenue in the OTT video segment is projected to reach USD 4.96 billion for South Asia in 2026, growing at a CAGR of 8.08% to reach USD 6.76 billion by 2030. India towers over the rest of the region. Its OTT market alone is estimated at USD 13 billion in 2026, scaling to USD 23.9 billion by 2030 at roughly 17.8% CAGR — nearly twenty times the combined projected size of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

Source: Muvi OTT Market Projection Report 2026–2030. All values USD.

The 80% problem: who are the non-payers?

The headline number — 601 million OTT users, 119 million paying — demands disaggregation. Who exactly makes up the 482-million-strong free-riding majority, and what would it actually take to convert them?

The free cohort is not monolithic. It spans at least three structurally distinct groups. The first is the genuinely price-constrained: households in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, or rural areas, where Rs 499 per month for a streaming subscription represents a non-trivial discretionary expense. The second is the habituated-free: urban, middle-class consumers who grew up with YouTube and have simply never been given sufficient reason to pay. The third is the bundled-but-uncounted: subscribers who access OTT content through telecom bundles, cable tie-ins, or family plan sharing, and are technically paid-for but not individually revenue-generating at full tariff.

India’s projected ARPU of USD 9.02 in 2026 is the clearest indicator of the market’s monetisation ceiling at current subscription pricing. Compare this to the United States, where streaming ARPU runs above USD 15-20 per month, and the structural gap becomes apparent. The India market’s scale compensates for thin per-user economics — but only up to a point. User penetration is projected to grow from 37.44% in 2026 to 43.74% by 2030, with total paying users expected to reach 662.63 million by 2030. Whether that trajectory holds depends heavily on whether platforms can gradually ratchet up ARPU as the market matures.

The viewing behaviour of non-payers is not passive. India’s OTT audience watches 70 minutes of digital video per day at a weekly frequency of 12.5 sessions — engagement metrics that most Western subscription platforms would envy. The problem is not lack of interest. It is the mismatch between consumption intensity and willingness to pay, a gap that advertisers are currently more willing to bridge than subscribers themselves.

The ad model fills the gap — and then some

Into this monetisation gap steps advertising-based video on demand (AVoD), and it is stepping with considerable force. India’s AVoD market is projected to grow from USD 2.4 billion in 2026 to USD 4.5 billion by 2030, a CAGR of 16-18% that comfortably outpaces subscription video growth at 13.4% CAGR over the same period. In Pakistan, AVoD growth runs even faster at 18-20% CAGR, and Bangladesh follows at 15-18%. Across all four markets, AVoD is not just the dominant revenue model — it is the accelerating one.

The revenue share data for FY 2024-25 illustrates the concentration that results. YouTube alone commands 37.7% of combined OTT advertising and subscription revenue in India. JioCinema follows at 23.3%. Netflix, despite its global brand and premium pricing, accounts for just 7.6%. Disney+ Hotstar sits at 7.2%. Amazon Prime Video and MX Player combined hold 3.2%. Other digital media accounts for the remaining 13.3%.

India OTT revenue share — FY 2024–25

Source: Muvi OTT Market Projection Report. Revenue figures in INR Crore, FY 2024–25. JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar officially merged on February 2025, Now JioHotstar.

The YouTube number is the one that should command the most attention in any serious strategy discussion. India has the world’s largest YouTube audience at 467 million users — a base trained over more than fifteen years to expect professional-quality video content at zero monetary cost. Pakistan adds another 71.7 million YouTube users; Bangladesh contributes 34.5 million. Across the region, YouTube has functionally established the floor price for video: free.

Subscription video: real, but reaching its ceiling?

Subscription video on demand (SVoD) is not irrelevant in India — the market generated approximately USD 1.3 billion in revenue in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 3.21 billion by 2027 at a CAGR of 13.4%. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ Hotstar (Now JioHotstar) have each invested significantly in Indian original productions, signalling institutional confidence in the long-term trajectory of paid consumption.

But the subscription model faces structural headwinds that go beyond price sensitivity alone. Payment infrastructure, particularly the friction involved in setting up recurring digital payments for consumers without credit cards or with limited digital banking access, remains a genuine barrier in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets. Churn rates are high: Indian consumers have shown a consistent pattern of subscribing for a marquee release, watching it, and cancelling — a behaviour sometimes called ‘subscription tourism’ in industry parlance.

SVOD projections by country — to 2027

Source: Muvi OTT Market Projection Report. Projected revenue figures are estimates.

Notably, Pakistan and Bangladesh show higher SVoD CAGR projections than India (16-18% and 14-16% respectively), reflecting growth from a smaller base as payment infrastructure gradually improves. Sri Lanka, with the region’s highest internet penetration at 59.7%, presents an intriguing micro-market: better-connected than India on a per-capita basis, but with only 11.34 million active internet users total, constrained by population size.

The pay-per-view wedge: cricket changes the equation

Pay-per-view (PPV) and transactional video on demand (TVoD) represent a structurally under-appreciated segment of the South Asian market — precisely because it sidesteps the subscription reluctance problem entirely. Pakistan’s PPV market is projected at USD 12-15 million in 2026, growing to USD 26-32 million by 2030 at 16-18% CAGR. Bangladesh shows similar momentum at 14-16% CAGR.

The driver is cricket. Both nations have populations with a near-religious attachment to the sport, and broadcasting rights for international fixtures, the IPL, and the PSL are increasingly moving to digital platforms. Crucially, consumers who will not pay Rs 299 per month for a streaming subscription will pay for a single high-stakes match. Event-based monetisation trains payment behaviour without requiring the recurring commitment that subscription models demand. For India, PPV is projected to reach USD 420 million by 2030, growing at a more modest 7-8% CAGR from an already larger base.

The penetration curve: reframing what reach means

India’s internet penetration stands at 55.3% — which sounds substantial until you account for the population denominator. That 55.3% leaves approximately 630 million Indians still offline, a number larger than the entire population of the European Union. Bangladesh at 47.0%, Pakistan at 45.7%, and Sri Lanka at 59.7% are all in the steep middle section of their respective S-curves, where each percentage point of penetration growth translates to millions of first-time digital media consumers.

Internet penetration — current & trajectory

Source: Muvi OTT Market Projection Report. ’10pt Gain’ = incremental users if penetration rises by 10 percentage points.

Bangladesh’s internet penetration is projected to cross 60.4% by 2026 — a threshold that historically correlates with accelerating digital commerce and media consumption in emerging markets. Pakistan, crossing into the high-40s, sits at precisely the inflection point where mobile-first content platforms have historically seen their fastest audience growth.

Cheaper data plans across all four markets have been the primary accelerant. The arrival of 6G technology and continued advances in device affordability are expected to sustain the momentum through the decade. The report projects India’s OTT user base reaching 662.63 million by 2030, with user penetration growing from 37.44% in 2026 to 43.74% — meaning an additional 200-plus million users entering the addressable OTT audience in four years.

The market data points toward several strategic implications that cut against conventional wisdom about how streaming markets mature.

First, the conversion imperative is more urgent than the acquisition imperative. With 601 million users already in the funnel, the marginal cost of adding free users is declining. The high-value work is converting the 482 million non-payers — or, more realistically, engineering hybrid models (ad-lite tiers, bundled subscriptions, telco partnerships) that extract more revenue per free user without requiring full subscription commitment.

Second, AVoD is not a transitional phase. The data suggests it is the permanent dominant model for most of South Asia outside urban India. Platforms that treat AVoD as a stepping stone to SVoD may be misreading the structural conditions. Pakistan and Bangladesh show higher AVoD CAGR than SVoD CAGR — the gap is not closing, it is widening.

Third, ad-tech infrastructure is the highest-leverage investment in the region. If AVoD is where most of the revenue lives, then the quality of targeting, measurement, and programmatic delivery determines which platforms command premium CPMs and which are commoditised. YouTube’s 37.7% revenue share is as much a function of ad-tech superiority as content quality.

Fourth, sports rights are underpriced as an OTT asset. Cricket’s ability to generate PPV willingness-to-pay in markets otherwise resistant to digital payments makes broadcasting rights a strategic acquisition, not merely a content investment. The platform that locks in cricket rights in Pakistan and Bangladesh over the next five years is buying a payment-behaviour training programme at content-rights prices.

There is a version of the India OTT story that reads as cautionary: a billion-dollar market where 80% of users pay nothing, ARPU sits below USD 10, and YouTube takes more than a third of all revenue. That reading is not wrong.

But there is another version that reads as the most compelling media investment thesis in Asia: a market with 70-minute daily engagement, 97% smartphone penetration, an internet user base still in its steepest growth phase, and a non-paying cohort so large that even modest conversion rates represent billions in incremental revenue. The 482 million who watch without paying are not a problem to be solved. They are an audience to be monetised — on terms they are actually willing to accept.

The South Asian OTT market by 2030 will not look like Netflix’s America or even Disney+’s India of today (JioHotstar). It will be something more complicated, more ad-saturated, more event-driven, and more price-segmented than any Western streaming archetype. The platforms that succeed will be those that stop measuring themselves against ARPU benchmarks designed for markets with fundamentally different income distributions — and start building for the market that actually exists.

Data sourced from: Muvi OTT Market Projection Report — India & South Asia 2026–2030; Statista Consumer Insights; Grand View Research (India Smart TV Market); industry filings and analyst estimates.