As CTV scales in India, can ad loads rise without breaking the viewing experience?

I was halfway through Sinners, completely locked into the film’s central musical sequence, when the screen abruptly cut to an advertisement. Not before the song. Not after it. Right in the middle of the movie’s musical centrepiece. Later, another pivotal moment was interrupted. By then, the irritation was no longer simply that there were ads, but something more basic: why on earth would you put one there?

That irritation arrives at an unusually relevant moment for Indian television. Earlier this month, the government removed the 12-minute-per-hour advertising cap that had governed linear television since 2006, arguing, among other things, that broadcasters were competing against digital platforms that faced no equivalent restriction. The amendment was notified on August 21.

The regulatory change effectively leaves the question of how much advertising is too much to the market. And while the new rules apply to linear television rather than streaming, the distinction is increasingly porous on the living-room screen: broadcasters, OTT platforms and advertisers are all competing for the same prime-time attention, even as CTV operates without a comparable ad-duration ceiling.

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That increasingly matters as Connected Television becomes a mainstream Indian viewing habit. A recent WPP Media and The Trade Desk report, in partnership with Ormax Media, estimates that CTV now reaches 207 million viewers across 62–65 million households, three times its 2022 footprint. Average daily viewing stands at 2.9 hours, while 78% of users are on the big screen during the weekday 8–10 pm prime-time window.

For streaming platforms, that scale creates an obvious opportunity to monetise more aggressively. For advertisers, however, more available impressions do not necessarily translate into more valuable ones.

“There is a point where heavier ad loads can begin to work against the very attention advertisers are seeking,” says Sonal Jadhav, Managing Partner – West, Havas Media. “More impressions do not automatically mean more effective impressions.”

That is particularly consequential for CTV, she notes, because its premium positioning has been built around full-screen viewing, premium content and a relatively uncluttered advertising environment. As inventory expands, preserving that experience becomes central to preserving advertiser value itself.

The distinction matters because CTV’s attraction is not simply reach. The WPP Media-The Trade Desk research found that one CTV impression reaches an average 2.5 people because of co-viewing, while 83% of viewers reported taking some action after seeing an ad. The commercial proposition, therefore, rests heavily on attention.

Russhabh R Thakkar, Founder and CEO of Frodoh, argues that the problem is not necessarily an expanding supply of CTV inventory, particularly as adoption spreads beyond metros and FAST channels open up new audiences.

“The real risk is not more supply. It is undifferentiated supply,” he says. As CTV scales, he expects a widening gap between premium, high-attention inventory and generic viewing environments, making attention quality more important than sheer impression volume.

That quality is also about more than simply how many ads appear. Where they appear, how frequently they recur and what surrounds them increasingly matter.

Jadhav argues that ad load, placement, frequency and repetition should become part of how CTV inventory itself is evaluated, alongside reach and completion rates. Viewer attention, unlike inventory, remains finite.

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Thakkar makes a similar distinction. A completed view in the first position of a prime-time commercial break on premium programming, he says, cannot necessarily be valued in the same way as a completed view in a lower-attention environment at an off-peak hour. Inventory quality, he argues, will increasingly have to account for ad position, content environment, time of day and frequency.

Frequency poses an additional problem because CTV viewing is fragmented across apps and platforms.

According to Meeta Gupta, Director – Client Relations, The Trade Desk in India, CTV’s relatively lighter advertising experience remains one of its advantages over linear television, but “that advantage can disappear quickly if viewers keep seeing the same ad”.

“More inventory shouldn’t automatically mean more ads,” she says, arguing that advertisers need to look beyond completion rates towards frequency, incremental reach, attention and eventual business outcomes.

And even apparently sensible frequency caps can fail at an ecosystem level. One streaming publisher may know how many times it has served an ad to a household, but not how many times that same household has encountered the campaign elsewhere.

“Every publisher can appear to be within its own limits while the viewer is still seeing the same ad too often overall,” Gupta notes.

That creates an odd contradiction for a medium built around sophisticated targeting. CTV can increasingly identify households, audiences and desirable consumer cohorts with remarkable precision, while the viewing experience can still occasionally feel remarkably blunt.

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There may never be a universal answer to how many ads are too many. A short, intelligently placed break may be less disruptive than a single advertisement dropped into the worst possible moment of a film. Likewise, a modest ad load can become exhausting if the same creative follows a household across several services.

But as CTV adds audiences and inventory, advertisers and platforms may have to stop treating every completed impression as equivalent. The scarce commodity was never the ad slot. It was the viewer’s attention.

And interrupt enough songs at the wrong moment, and eventually you lose that too.