A brand manager at a mid-sized FMCG company in Mumbai told us something useful last quarter. Her team had decided OTT advertising was the right move; that decision was already made. What she actually needed was someone to walk her through which platform to start with, how the buying process worked, and whether the budget her CFO had approved was even enough to do anything meaningful.
That is a different question from "should we advertise on OTT platforms." It is "how do we actually do this." This guide is built to answer that second question directly: a practical, platform-by-platform walkthrough for brands that have already decided OTT belongs in their media plan and need to understand exactly what advertising on these platforms entails.
What Are OTT Platforms?
OTT stands for over-the-top, a reference to content delivered directly over the internet, bypassing the traditional cable or satellite infrastructure that television has relied on for decades. An OTT platform is any streaming service that delivers video content this way: JioHotstar, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, SonyLIV, ZEE5, and dozens of smaller regional and niche players.
For advertisers, the term carries a specific meaning. An OTT platform is a place where video ad inventory can be bought and served to an audience that is actively watching long-form content a show, a movie, a live match rather than scrolling a social feed or browsing a search results page. This distinction matters enormously for how the advertising actually performs, which the sections below cover in detail.
It is worth separating two related but distinct terms that often get used interchangeably. OTT refers to the content delivery method and covers any device: mobile, tablet, laptop, or television. Connected TV (CTV) refers specifically to OTT content viewed on a television screen, whether through a smart TV's built-in apps or a streaming device like a Fire TV Stick or Chromecast connected to the television. Advertising inventory on connected TV devices is generally priced at a premium compared to mobile OTT inventory, because the viewing environment a larger screen, household setting, often shared viewing produces measurably stronger ad recall.
Popular OTT Advertising Platforms in India
The Indian OTT landscape consolidated significantly through 2025, and understanding the current platform map is essential before deciding where to spend.
JioHotstar
The result of the February 2025 merger between JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar, JioHotstar is now the largest streaming platform in India by a wide margin, reaching more than 500 million users. It holds rights to marquee sports properties including the IPL and ICC tournaments, alongside a content library spanning Disney, HBO, Warner Bros, and NBCUniversal titles plus a substantial regional content base across nineteen languages. For brands seeking national reach, JioHotstar functions as the default anchor platform in most 2026 media plans, particularly for any campaign with a sports-adjacent or mass-market objective.
SonyLIV
A strong platform for brands wanting to reach audiences engaged with regional cinema, reality television formats, and specific sports properties Sony holds rights to. SonyLIV's audience tends to skew toward viewers seeking a mix of Hindi general entertainment and regional content, making it a useful complement to JioHotstar's sports-heavy audience profile.
ZEE5
Particularly strong for regional language targeting, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, and other South Indian languages are well represented. Brands running campaigns that need genuine regional language creative and content genre alignment, rather than a one-size-fits-all national message, find ZEE5 a valuable platform in the mix.
Amazon Prime Video
Operates primarily on a subscription model with select ad-supported tiers and sponsorship opportunities. The audience here tends to skew toward a premium, established demographic with strong purchasing power, making Prime Video a fit for brands prioritising association with premium content over sheer reach scale.
Netflix
Has expanded its ad-supported tier significantly in recent years, including incorporating AI-assisted ad tools for advertisers. Like Prime Video, the audience and content environment lean premium, suiting brands focused on brand-safe association rather than mass reach.
YouTube (Connected TV App)
While not a licensed OTT platform in the traditional sense, YouTube's growing share of connected TV screen time means it increasingly competes for the same advertising budgets and audience attention as licensed streaming platforms, particularly for long-form content viewing on smart TVs.
MX Player, Voot, and Niche Regional Players
Smaller platforms that can offer cost-efficient reach for specific regional or demographic targeting needs, though typically used as supplementary inventory alongside a primary platform rather than as the anchor of a campaign.
Benefits of OTT Advertising
The case for advertising on OTT platforms rests on a few structural advantages that traditional television and standard digital advertising each lack individually.
Television-scale reach with digital-grade targeting. OTT platforms combine the audience scale that used to be exclusive to broadcast television with the precision targeting capabilities of the digital advertising age, gender, geography down to city or pincode level, device type, and content genre preference. This combination did not exist in Indian media buying a decade ago.
Higher attention and recall than mobile social feeds: A viewer watching a show on a connected TV screen is in a leaned-back, focused viewing state, fundamentally different from someone scrolling a phone where the next post is a thumb flick away. Brands consistently report stronger message recall and brand lift from CTV placements compared to equivalent spend on mobile social platforms.
Brand-safe, premium content adjacency. Advertising alongside professionally produced, licensed content carries a credibility signal that lower-cost programmatic display inventory across the open web simply cannot replicate. This matters particularly for categories like financial services and real estate, where trust signals influence purchase consideration directly.
Measurable, trackable performance. Unlike traditional television, where measurement has historically relied on panel-based estimates, OTT advertising offers granular, platform-reported impression and completion data, and increasingly, cross-device attribution that connects an OTT ad exposure to a subsequent action on a different device.
Regional and language-specific targeting at scale. With major platforms now streaming content across fifteen to nineteen languages, brands can run genuinely localised campaigns: different creative, different language, different cultural references across India's diverse regional markets in a way that was logistically difficult through traditional television buying.
Lower production barriers than ever before. AI-assisted creative tools, now integrated into major ad platforms, allow brands to produce broadcast-quality video ad variants including AI-generated voiceovers and automated conversion of static product images into video formats at a fraction of the cost and time traditional video production required, opening premium OTT inventory to a much broader range of advertisers.
OTT vs Traditional TV Advertising
This is the comparison every brand evaluating a media plan eventually has to make directly.
Targeting precision
Traditional television buys reach by time slot, channel, and program a reasonable proxy for audience type, but a blunt instrument. A brand buying a slot during a popular evening soap reaches everyone watching, with no way to exclude or specifically target by demographic, location, or interest. OTT advertising allows granular targeting down to specific audience segments, geographic areas, and even individual household profiles through connected TV identity matching.
Measurement
Traditional TV measurement in India has historically relied on BARC ratings panel-based audience estimates extrapolated to the national population. OTT platforms report actual impression delivery, view completion rates, and increasingly support cross-device attribution that connects ad exposure to subsequent digital actions. The difference between estimated reach and measured reach is significant for brands that need to justify media spend with concrete data.
Cost structure and entry barriers
Traditional television advertising, particularly during prime time or major events, requires substantial minimum spend commitments and lengthy lead times for production and slot booking. OTT advertising, particularly through programmatic buying, allows much more flexible entry points; campaigns can start with budgets in the low lakhs rather than the tens of lakhs traditional television often requires, and campaigns can launch on shorter timelines.
Audience fragmentation and reach decline
Traditional television viewership, particularly among urban audiences under 40, has been declining steadily as streaming consumption grows. Brands that rely exclusively on traditional television risk reaching an increasingly older, more rural-skewing audience while missing the urban, younger, higher-spending demographic that has shifted decisively to streaming.
Where traditional TV still holds an edge
Traditional television retains genuine advantages for certain objectives: mass simultaneous reach during a live national event watched by audiences who may not have streaming access, and a still meaningful reach among older and rural demographics where streaming penetration remains lower than in urban India. The practical answer for most brands in 2026 is not OTT versus television as a binary choice, but a deliberate allocation between both based on the specific audience and objective of each campaign.
How Brands Can Advertise on OTT Platforms: The Actual Process
Here is what the buying process looks like in practice, step by step
Step 1 — Define the objective and target audience precisely
Before any platform conversation, clarity on what the campaign needs to achieve brand awareness, consideration, app installs, direct response and a clear definition of the target audience by demographic, geography, and interest determines which platforms and ad formats actually make sense.
Step 2 — Choose a buying method: direct, programmatic, or agency-managed Direct buying means negotiating directly with a platform's ad sales team, typically suited to larger campaigns wanting specific placements, custom targeting packages, or premium inventory like homepage takeovers. Programmatic buying uses demand-side platforms to bid for inventory across multiple OTT and CTV publishers through an automated auction, generally more cost-efficient and flexible but offering less granular control over exact placement. Agency-managed buying combines both approaches, with an agency negotiating direct platform relationships while also running programmatic campaigns, and handling the strategic allocation between them based on campaign goals.
Step 3 — Select platforms based on audience overlap, not just scale
JioHotstar's enormous reach makes it a natural starting point for most campaigns, but the right platform mix depends on where the specific target audience actually spends time. A campaign targeting Tier 2 Maharashtra audiences interested in regional content allocates differently than one targeting urban English-speaking professionals interested in international content.
Step 4 — Produce creative suited to the viewing context
OTT and CTV creative needs to account for a leaned-back, attentive viewing environment rather than a scrolling mobile feed, generally supporting slightly longer narrative structures, stronger reliance on audio since sound is rarely muted in this context, and visual clarity suited to large screens.
Step 5 — Set up measurement and tracking before launch
Whatever the campaign objective, the relevant measurement infrastructure view-through tracking, cross-device attribution for performance campaigns, brand lift study setup for awareness campaigns needs to be configured before the campaign goes live, not added afterward.
Step 6 — Launch, monitor, and optimise across the campaign window
Most OTT platforms and programmatic buying tools allow mid-campaign optimisation, shifting budget toward better-performing placements, audience segments, or creative variants based on early performance data, similar to how a digital advertising campaign would be managed.
For brands without an in-house team experienced in this process, working with an OTT advertising agency that already holds platform relationships and programmatic buying infrastructure typically produces better rates and more efficient execution than attempting direct platform negotiation independently for the first time.
OTT Advertising Costs in 2026
Pricing on OTT platforms is predominantly CPM-based cost per 1,000 impressions delivered, though some platforms offer CostPer-Completed-View pricing for skippable formats, where brands only pay when a viewer watches the ad through to completion.
Standard programmatic OTT and CTV inventory, without heavy targeting layers, typically runs in the range of Rs. 300 to Rs. 550 CPM. Premium, high-demand inventory live sports broadcasts like the IPL and marquee Original series premieres commands significantly more, often Rs. 800 to Rs. 1,400 CPM, reflecting both concurrent audience scale and the premium content environment. Standard video pre-roll and mid-roll inventory outside marquee live events on platforms like JioHotstar, SonyLIV, and ZEE5 tends to sit in a more moderate band, with rate cards showing figures in the Rs. 50 to Rs. 90 range for less heavily targeted buys, climbing as additional targeting layers are applied.
For a brand evaluating budget readiness, a focused test campaign generally needs a minimum of Rs. 1 lakh to Rs. 2 lakh to gather meaningful performance data. Direct platform buys with dedicated targeting and account management typically recommend Rs. 2 lakh to Rs. 5 lakh as a workable starting point. Large national campaigns with advanced targeting layers regularly exceed Rs. 10 lakh.
A detailed breakdown of platform-specific pricing dynamics, seasonal cost variation, and what drives CPMs up or down is covered in our companion guide on OTT advertising in India, which goes deeper into the platform economics and 2026 market context behind these numbers.
Choosing the Right OTT Advertising Partner
Most brands evaluating OTT for the first time underestimate how much coordination the process actually requires: platform negotiations, creative adaptation across formats and languages, programmatic infrastructure setup, and cross-device measurement configuration are not trivial to manage without prior experience.
Leap Booster Technology's digital marketing services include OTT and connected TV media planning as part of an integrated strategy connecting the broad awareness that premium streaming placements build to the performance marketing and retargeting campaigns that convert that awareness into measurable results, rather than treating OTT as an isolated, disconnected line item in the media plan.
FAQs
What is the difference between OTT advertising and connected TV advertising?
OTT advertising covers any ad inventory served across internet-delivered streaming content, regardless of the device mobile, tablet, desktop, or television. Connected TV (CTV) advertising specifically refers to ads served to viewers watching on a smart TV or a device connected to a television screen. CTV is a subset of OTT advertising and typically commands a pricing premium due to the stronger viewer attention and recall associated with the larger-screen, household viewing environment.
Which is the best OTT advertising platform for a brand just starting?
JioHotstar offers the broadest reach following its 2025 merger and is the natural starting point for most brands new to OTT advertising, particularly for campaigns with mass-market or sports-adjacent objectives. However, the genuinely "best" platform depends on the specific target audience; a brand targeting a strong regional language audience may find ZEE5 or SonyLIV more efficient for that specific objective than JioHotstar's broader, sports-heavy audience profile.
Can a brand advertise on multiple OTT platforms simultaneously?
Yes, and for most campaigns with meaningful budget, running across multiple platforms is the more effective approach. Combining JioHotstar's reach with the regional or niche audience strength of platforms like ZEE5 or SonyLIV produces a more complete picture than concentrating an entire budget on a single platform. Programmatic buying through a demand-side platform can manage this multiplatform allocation more efficiently than negotiating separate direct deals with each platform individually.
How long does it take to launch an OTT advertising campaign?
Programmatic campaigns can launch relatively quickly, often within one to two weeks once creative assets and targeting parameters are finalised. Direct buys with platforms, particularly for premium placements like homepage takeovers during high-demand periods, often require longer lead times, sometimes several weeks to a few months for availability and creative approval, especially around major events like the IPL or festive seasons when demand for premium inventory peaks.
Is OTT advertising worth it for a brand with a limited budget?
Yes, with the right approach. Rather than attempting broad national reach with a limited budget, a more efficient strategy for smaller budgets is tight geographic and audience targeting on a single well-matched platform, using programmatic buying to control costs, and focusing on a specific campaign window rather than running continuously. AI-assisted creative production has also lowered the production cost barrier significantly, making professional-quality OTT advertising more accessible to brands that previously could not justify the creative investment.
Do OTT platforms offer any self-serve advertising options, or is everything managed through sales teams?
Several platforms and most programmatic demand-side platforms offer self-serve buying options for brands wanting to manage campaigns directly without going through a platform's dedicated sales team. Self-serve options generally suit smaller budgets and simpler campaign structures, while larger campaigns seeking premium placements, custom targeting packages, or dedicated account support typically still go through direct sales negotiations or work through an agency that maintains those platform relationships.
Advertising on OTT platforms in India in 2026 is no longer a question of whether the channel works; the reach, targeting precision, and measurement capability are well established. The real work is in choosing the right platform mix, structuring the buy efficiently, and connecting the awareness it builds to the rest of a brand's marketing funnel.
If you are ready to move from evaluating OTT advertising to actually planning a campaign, Leap Booster Technology can walk through platform selection, realistic budgets, and execution timelines specific to your brand. Start at leapboostertech.com/contact or call +91 91560 21864.
Leap Booster Technology Pvt. Ltd. OTT & Connected TV Advertising Agency, India Platform Strategy • Programmatic Buying • Creative Production • Cross-Device Attribution leapboostertech.com/contact | +91 91560 21864 | Pune, Maharashtra
