India's connected TV ad inventory now outpaces advertiser demand

September 13, 2026 · agencyreporter.com

Electronics retailers across India have all but stopped stocking non-smart television sets, as manufacturers from Noida's value brands to South Delhi's premium showrooms have converted their entire line-ups to ad-supported smart operating systems, agencyreporter.com reports. That shift, combined with a wave of ad-supported streaming tiers launched over the past two years and inventory sold separately at the operator and app-store level, has turned what was once a single scarce category, premium content on a big screen, into dozens of overlapping inventory pools competing for the same advertiser budget. Sell-through rates have been sliding even as the number of connected screens keeps climbing, and ad tech professionals tracking programmatic CTV auctions describe fill rates low enough that remnant inventory gets bundled into deals priced below the cost of running the auction.

Rates that would have been unthinkable eighteen months ago are now negotiable, and premium placements once reserved for expensive upfront commitments are increasingly available on flexible or programmatic terms. Buyers building addressable, sequenced CTV campaigns are being rewarded for that precision, because no scarcity premium punishes patience right now. The gap holding total demand back is structural: three or four competing definitions of a completed view across OEM platforms, streaming apps and exchanges eat into the budget and time planners could spend buying more inventory, while performance marketers, the fastest-growing source of ad budget in India, have yet to trust the category enough to shift real money toward it.