CTV in India: Who is really in charge?

As Connected TV budgets continue to rise in India, one question keeps resurfacing inside advertiser organisations: who actually owns the channel?

It is a deceptively simple question. In practice, CTV sits awkwardly between television, digital, and performance teams, inheriting expectations from all three without being fully absorbed by any of them. While spend on CTV has moved from pilot budgets to recurring line items, internal ownership structures have struggled to keep pace.

The result is a channel that is widely bought, enthusiastically presented, and increasingly scrutinised, but rarely anchored to a single team responsible for outcomes. In many organisations, CTV is everyone’s line item and no one’s accountability.

For marketers, the confusion stems from how CTV is framed internally. While (perhaps) humorously stating that ownership should lie with CMOs, veteran marketer Shubhranshu Singh points out that the channel still exists in a grey zone between legacy television thinking and digital performance logic. 

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“It’s true that CTV still sits in a grey area between television legacy media and digital,” he says. “Historically, it’s been viewed as an extension of linear TV. But more recently, and for good reasons, digital and performance teams see it as part of the addressable, data-led ecosystem.”

In theory, ownership is often centralised. “In most large set-ups, a centralised media team takes ownership,” Singh says. In practice, that structural ownership does not resolve deeper tensions. “What’s important is to see CTV as a full-funnel medium rather than a channel,” he adds, arguing that responsibility is only now beginning to shift away from channel silos toward more integrated media leadership.

The absence of clear ownership, Singh notes, has tangible consequences. “The lack of clear ownership can create friction,” he says. “It can also mean siloed planning, where CTV is either seen as a branding medium or purely preferred on short-term performance metrics.”

On the buying side, this often results in inefficiencies. “This can lead to parallel negotiations with broadcasters, OTT platforms, and programmatic partners, reducing scale efficiency,” Singh explains. Evaluation, too, becomes fractured. “The currency of evaluation is different because one sees reach, the other sees ROI.”

This ambiguity has persisted even as CTV has moved from novelty to meaningful reach. By late 2025, India had an estimated 60–65 million connected TV households, driven by smart TV penetration, affordable broadband, and the rapid rise of ad-supported OTT consumption. While that figure remains far below linear television’s 300 million-plus household reach, it has been sufficient to push CTV into mainstream media plans.

Ad spends have followed. Industry estimates place CTV advertising investments in India at roughly ₹2,300–3,000 crore by the end of 2025, growing up to 40 percent year on year. For large advertisers, CTV is no longer treated as experimental inventory. It increasingly appears as a premium video layer in annual plans, positioned somewhere between television reach and digital addressability.

What has not kept pace, however, is organisational clarity.

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Shradha Agarwal, Co-founder and Global CEO of Grapes Worldwide, says CTV ownership rarely sits neatly with a single team today. “CTV ownership today doesn’t sit neatly with one team,” she says. “While it often started with traditional TV teams, the responsibility is steadily shifting towards digital and media teams, with performance teams playing a much stronger role than before.”

As measurement capabilities improve, Agarwal says organisations are experimenting with collaborative models. “As CTV becomes more data-driven and measurable, organisations are moving towards shared ownership, where TV, digital, and performance teams collaborate with common KPIs,” she says. 

The teams driving strategy, she adds, are “the ones best equipped to blend storytelling with targeting, measurement, and optimisation.”

That shared ownership, however, brings its own inefficiencies. “The absence of clear ownership has, at times, led to friction,” Agarwal admits. “We see overlaps in planning, fragmented budgets, and differing success metrics between TV, digital, and performance teams, which can slow decision-making and dilute impact.”

While Agarwal describes this as a transition phase, the operational reality is that agencies are often left to arbitrate between competing internal expectations, smoothing over inconsistencies without necessarily resolving them.

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From the adtech side, the debate is increasingly being reframed. Nikhil Kumar, Chief Growth Officer at mediasmart by Affle, argues that CTV’s hybrid nature makes traditional ownership questions less relevant. As CTV's targeting, measurement, and outcome-driven conversion capabilities evolved over time, performance teams are also increasingly leaning towards including CTV in the media mix.”

Because CTV spans brand and performance objectives, Kumar says planners are now thinking beyond silos. “Ultimately, the focus shifts from ‘who owns CTV’ to ‘how do we make CTV work harder as part of the full funnel’,” he says. Programmatic activation plays a central role in that shift. “When CTV is activated through a full-funnel programmatic DSP, it stops behaving like an isolated branding channel and starts functioning as a performance lever,” Kumar argues.

That approach, he adds, enables alignment by offering a unified view of exposure, frequency, and outcomes across screens, making it easier to understand CTV’s contribution to downstream engagement and action.

Yet while programmatic unification may simplify execution, it does not eliminate the internal question of accountability when outcomes fall short.

Platform operators see the fragmentation more bluntly. Abhijeet Rajpurohit, COO and Co-founder of CloudTV, says ownership patterns are shaped largely by organisational history. “Because CTV sits at the intersection of TV and digital, who owns it usually depends on the company’s heritage,” he says. “Broadcast-first organisations tend to place CTV with TV or brand teams, while streaming-first or digital-native companies typically give ownership to digital or performance teams.”

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The biggest challenges, Rajpurohit notes, emerge in hybrid organisations. “In hybrid organisations where both TV and digital teams exist or are being built, ownership often becomes unclear, as each team views CTV through its own lens and has only a partial understanding of the channel,” he says.

That lack of clarity, he adds, directly affects execution. “Planning, buying, and measurement often become misaligned,” Rajpurohit says. “TV teams apply reach-led thinking, digital teams focus on performance metrics, and CTV ends up evaluated inconsistently.” The result is “duplicated effort, internal debate, and under-utilisation of CTV’s full potential.” True end-to-end expertise across both TV and digital, he notes, “remains rare,” which is why fragmentation persists.

Taken together, the inputs reveal a consistent pattern. CTV has budgets, dashboards, and expectations. What it lacks in many Indian organisations is a single internal owner willing or empowered to account for outcomes.

As CTV moves deeper into annual planning cycles and comes under greater scrutiny from leadership teams, that ambiguity becomes harder to ignore. For now, the channel remains suspended between teams, shaped as much by organisational inertia as by media strategy. And as its role in the media mix expands, the question is whether the structures around it will ever fully catch up.