The case for FAST: Regional television’s next prime-time opportunity

India’s television screen is undergoing a structural reset, not a cosmetic one. The Connected TV Era: India’s New Prime Time — the WPP Media–The Trade Desk report puts hard numbers to what the industry has sensed for a while: Connected TV (CTV) now reaches 207 million viewers across 62–65 million households, three times its 2022 base. The average household spends 2.9 hours a day on the big screen, and because over 80% of that viewing is shared, a single ad impression effectively reaches 2.5 people. For anyone selling television inventory in India, that is not an incremental shift. It is a new market.

Buried inside that larger story is a narrower, more actionable one. Free Ad-Supported Television, or FAST, is what the report itself calls the “single largest untapped ad-funded inventory” in Indian CTV — and the numbers support the claim. A third of CTV viewers are already aware of FAST channels, one in five watch nearly 50 minutes of it daily, and FAST viewers average 3.4 hours a day on CTV, well above the market norm. For broadcasters, regional ones especially, this is less a trend to watch than a business line to build.

The Television Is Already the Platform

FAST works because it borrows the exact interface Indian audiences already default to. 82% of CTV users access streaming content through apps built directly into their smart TV, making the OEM ecosystem — Samsung, LG, Xiaomi and others — a distribution layer in its own right, not merely a hardware category. FAST channels sit inside that same layer: pre-installed, subscription-free, and familiar in form. For a regional broadcaster, the smart-TV operating system, not a standalone app, is now the front door to a mass audience. That door is already open; it simply hasn’t been walked through.

Growth Has Moved Out of the Metros

The second detail worth sitting with is where CTV growth is actually happening. Metro CTV grew 21% over the past year; mini-metros, 46%; small towns, 55%; rural India, 110%. The largest markets remain UP-Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh-Telangana, but the fastest growth is coming from Bihar-Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Kerala and the Northeast. Set against the industry’s broader shift toward regional-language OTT consumption, the opportunity sharpens further: this is precisely the geography where Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi and Bangla broadcasters already carry decades of audience trust and content depth. FAST gives them a low-friction way to carry that equity onto the connected screen, at the exact moment their audience is arriving there.

Reach That Linear Can No Longer Sell

There is also a harder, more commercial reason to move now. 32% of CTV audiences are cord-cutters or have never connected to linear TV at all — households that are simply unreachable through a traditional media plan, regardless of budget. FAST is often the only way back in. For advertisers, it does something linear television never could: it turns a regional GEC or movie channel into addressable inventory, targetable by geography, affluence and other audience signals, while still delivering the shared, big-screen attention that makes television valuable in the first place.

Extending What Already Works

None of this asks regional broadcasters to reinvent themselves. Their advantage is exactly what FAST rewards: language affinity, long-standing viewer relationships and brand equity built over decades on linear. What changes is the business model — a subscription-free, ad-funded channel built on content libraries that already exist, distributed through an OEM ecosystem that already reaches the household. For broadcasters without an in-house programmatic desk, the fastest path to monetising this inventory will likely run through specialist media sales and aggregation partners already positioned to package regional FAST supply for the advertiser demand now chasing it.

The inventory is being built either way. The only open question left for regional broadcasters is who ends up owning it.

Source: The Connected TV Era: India’s New Prime Time, WPP Media and The Trade Desk, with Ormax Media (2026).