In March, over the course of thirty-one evenings, 473 million individual devices in India opened a cricket stream. That sentence is boring on first read and terrifying on the second. It is boring because we have heard numbers like it before; it is terrifying because almost none of the old assumptions of this industry were built for it.
Six years ago a number like that would have been split across television, YouTube highlights, and a spreadsheet marked "approximate." In 2026 it is measurable, addressable, and — this is the part advertisers still do not quite believe — buyable by slice.
I · The numbers, honestly, hurt.
There are three numbers worth holding together. One: 473 million devices. Two: 68% of those devices are connected televisions. Three: the median viewer now speaks to the screen in a language that is not English.
We spent part of January inside the measurement stack of one league, which (because they asked us not to identify them) we will call League A. League A is not the IPL. It is bigger than you think and smaller than the IPL. Its 2026 in-house data team is twenty-two people. In 2020, it was two.
"The thing that broke us was not the scale. It was realising we'd been building for a viewer that — at this scale — simply does not exist anymore."
That is the head of audience at League A, off the record. He said it into a coffee cup in a conference room in Andheri, in a tone somewhere between embarrassment and relief. What he meant, once we unpacked it, was that the league had spent five years optimising for a metro English-speaking cricket fan with a subscription habit and a credit card. That fan is still there. But she is no longer the audience. She is a sliver of it.
II · What CTV actually bought us.
For brands, the migration to CTV has been told as a story about quality: bigger screens, better ads, fewer drop-offs. It is that. It is also something more important, which is that CTV is the first mass-scale sports medium in India that can be sold in slices. You can buy a match. You can buy an over. You can buy an over in a specific pincode. You can buy a creative that only runs when a left-handed batsman is on strike. Most of this has been technically possible for three years; in 2026 it is finally being used.
The money has not yet caught up to the capability. Spends on slice-level CTV in cricket were ₹680 crore in FY26, up from ₹112 crore in FY24. That is a ~6× in two years, from a base that was, honestly, rounding error. Our forecast puts slice CTV at ₹3,400 crore by FY28 in cricket alone.
III · The vernacular turn.
If the first story of the decade is CTV, the second — and it is a louder, deeper, stranger one — is language. Sixty-four percent of cricket minutes in March were consumed in a feed that was not English or Hindi. The biggest growth feed last season was Bhojpuri. The second was Kannada. Marathi is the third. Tamil and Telugu, the old Southern stalwarts, are not growing; they are enormous and stable.
This is where advertisers have historically misread the opportunity. The assumption has been that a vernacular feed is a translation of a primary feed — the same creative, the same casting, dubbed and recut. In 2026 that assumption costs you money. The leagues that have invested in feed-native creative — commentary that riffs on regional players, graphics in script, brand integrations that speak to the feed, not through it — are seeing dwell times 3.8× the dubbed average.
— to be continued in the print edition.