RunnTV CEO: CTV fragmentation is redrawing how India's TV ads get bought

August 30, 2026 · ?CTV advertising

For decades, television advertising ran on one assumption: buying a channel meant buying its audience, regardless of which cable or DTH operator delivered that channel into a home. Manish Sinha, founder and CEO of FAST and CTV platform RunnTV, writes in a guest column for afaqs that connected television is dismantling that assumption. "The distribution network was largely invisible to the advertiser," he notes of the cable and DTH era. Channels now reach households across multiple Smart TV operating systems, streaming apps, OEM ecosystems and FAST platforms, and in many cases the distribution platform itself takes a role in monetisation. Buying "a channel," Sinha argues, increasingly means buying access to that channel across several distribution layers, sometimes through a partner that aggregates inventory across them.

Campaigns once bought against a single channel now have to account for how that channel is distributed, since ad decisioning, insertion and reporting can differ by platform and OEM. Sinha's proposed fix is a common infrastructure layer spanning content, rights, distribution, security, monetisation and analytics, so a channel's reach and performance can be measured consistently even as it fragments across Smart TV ecosystems, apps and FAST services. Media buyers evaluating CTV and FAST inventory in India will need clarity on which distribution platforms a given deal actually covers, and how measurement holds up once a single channel buy spans several technical environments.