The wall that used to separate broadcast television, global subscription streaming, and digital platforms has dissolved. India's media and entertainment sector grew 9% in 2025 to reach ₹2.78 lakh crore ($32 billion), with digital media crossing the ₹1.00 lakh crore mark for the first time and overtaking television as the industry's largest segment. Evaluating this space now means looking past legacy TV footprints entirely, and tracking something messier: cross-platform audience share, spanning linear TV, streaming, and the algorithmic feeds that increasingly decide what 900 million Indians actually watch.
Three forces are reshaping who controls that attention, corporate consolidation at the top, a genuinely unsettled streaming war in the middle, and a quiet handover of the news relationship itself to platforms and individuals that no boardroom controls.
The Consolidation at the Top
Sports broadcasting in India is no longer a competitive market in any conventional sense. The merger of Viacom18 and Disney Star into JioStar has created a single entity commanding an estimated 75-80% of live sports ad volume and viewership, a near-monopoly built on cricket rights that no independent challenger can realistically bid against.
It's worth being precise about who actually owns that entity, because the ownership structure has shifted since the deal was first announced. At the November 2024 closing, Reliance held 63.16% (split between a direct stake and its Viacom18 holding) against Disney's 36.84%. But Disney's own SEC filings now describe the current structure as Reliance holding a majority 56% stake, Disney holding 37%, and investment platform Bodhi Tree Systems holding the remaining 7%, a reminder that these joint-venture cap tables keep moving even after the headline deal closes, so any "who owns what" table needs a filing date attached to it.
The same entity anchors India's entertainment vertical too, sitting alongside Zee Entertainment and Sun TV Network (the latter dominant in the South) as the country's remaining large linear players. But the more interesting story isn't linear television at all, it's what's happening in streaming, where JioStar's own scale advantage turns out to be far less secure.
The Streaming War Nobody Has Actually Won
This is where the 'omnichannel monopoly' story gets more complicated. By Q2 2026, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video were tied at 22% each of India's SVOD engagement, with JioHotstar and Apple TV+ also tied at 18% each. That last figure is the one worth sitting with: JioStar's own streaming platform, despite sitting inside the same company that dominates sports and entertainment broadcasting, lost seven percentage points year-on-year — the steepest annual decline of any major platform — while Apple TV+, a genuinely late entrant, posted the fastest growth in the market over the same period.
(One important caveat on this data: JustWatch's figures measure user engagement — watchlist adds, clicks, searches — not subscriber counts or revenue, so treat this as a proxy for attention, not a market-share filing.)
The takeaway isn't that JioStar is losing — its linear and sports dominance remains close to unassailable. It's that owning the pipes (spectrum, cricket rights, cable infrastructure) and owning the streaming relationship are turning out to be two different businesses, and India's biggest media conglomerate is winning only one of them decisively.
A Fragmenting, Three-Tier News Economy
News is where corporate ownership, algorithmic distribution, and independent journalism collide most visibly, and it's splitting into three distinct operating models rather than one converged market:
Legacy hybrids — Network18, Times Internet, TV Today, and the smaller AMG Media Networks (NDTV) — are using profits and infrastructure built for television to construct digital-content aggregates monetised largely through programmatic advertising. Their scale still comes from decades of broadcast trust and reach, now repackaged for a phone screen.
Digital-native corporate operations, like India Today Group's Lallantop, have bypassed the television constraint entirely — building vernacular, YouTube-first video brands that scale on platform-native formats rather than linear schedules.
Independent, subscriber- and donor-funded outlets — The Print, The Wire, Newslaundry, Scroll — operate at a fraction of the reach of the first two tiers, but their commercial and civic value comes from who reads them rather than raw traffic, funded through direct reader subscriptions and crowdfunding specifically to avoid dependency on the same ad networks the legacy players lean on.
The specific reach percentages circulating for each of these outlets (Network18's linear share, individual reach figures for The Print or The Wire, and so on) come from a mix of BARC data and self-reported platform figures that shift by measurement period and are sometimes contested.
The Real Disruption Isn't Between These Companies — It's Beneath All of Them
Every company named above — corporate incumbent or premium streamer — is competing for a pool of advertising money that is itself being captured somewhere else. Google and Meta's search and social platforms claimed 64% of India's ₹0.947 Lakh Crore digital ad market in 2025, a market that itself now makes up the majority of a ₹2.78 Lakh Crore sector's growth. Corporate media houses and premium streamers alike are increasingly forced to distribute promotional clips across YouTube and Instagram just to acquire users — turning platforms into the landlords and legacy media into content suppliers paying rent in engagement.
The trust data makes the shift starker. Around 58% of Indian respondents now rely on YouTube for news, according to the Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report, even as overall trust in institutional news fell to 39% — its lowest point since Reuters began tracking the measure in 2015. Meanwhile, individual creators and personalities have built direct distribution pipelines no editor or boardroom controls: Virat Kohli's Instagram following sits at roughly 272-274 million, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi crossed 100 million Instagram followers in February 2026 — becoming the first world leader to do so, more than double Donald Trump's count on the same platform.
That's the structural trend worth naming plainly: corporate conglomerates and streaming studios still own the delivery infrastructure — the spectrum, the cricket rights, the production studios. But individual creators and platform algorithms now own the actual relationship with the audience. And in a ₹2.78 lakh crore industry, that distinction is worth more than any single ownership stake.
Read More:
EY India Media & Entertainment Reports | Reuters Institute Digital News Report | JustWatch Media Insights
Recommended Book:
The Indian Media Business by Vanita Kohli-Khandekar
This book offers the most comprehensive structural breakdown of how Indian television, print, and digital mediums evolved from fragmented local markets into a multi-billion dollar corporate battleground.
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Indian Cricketers | Paper Leaks | Education Spending | The Stadium bottleneck
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