Regional Language Audiences Are India's Fastest-Growing Audience Nobody Is Planning For

Aug 4, 2026 ●5 min read

Every media plan in India still starts the same way. Hindi general entertainment gets the lion's share of the budget, English content gets the halo positioning for brand safety, and everything else gets filed under regional, a line item that shows up late in the plan and gets treated as a compliance exercise rather than a growth opportunity.

That approach made sense when television was linear, and reach was the only currency that mattered. It does not hold up anymore. CTV has quietly turned regional language viewing into the largest and fastest-growing pool of attention in the country, and most brands are still buying it the way they used to buy a Doordarshan slot three decades ago.

Look at where the actual viewing is happening. JioHotstar's regional content libraries pull in audiences that rival or exceed Hindi GEC in raw hours watched. Sony LIV and ZEE5 have spent years building out Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, and Punjabi catalogues precisely because that is where subscriber growth and watch time are coming from, not from another Hindi drama. FAST channels built around regional cinema and devotional content are among the stickiest, most habitually watched inventory on connected TV today. None of this is a niche. It is the market.

What most brands do instead is take a Hindi or English creative, run it through a voiceover pass, and call it localization. The audience notices. A dubbed ad in a regional feed reads as exactly what it is, an afterthought dressed up as inclusion. It does not build the same trust or recall as a piece of content made for that audience, in that language, sitting inside content the audience actually chose to watch.

This is where CTV changes the economics of the problem. Linear could not be targeted by language and geography with any real precision, so regional got bundled into a blanket buy and budgeted like a rounding error. CTV can be targeted by genre, language, and gender down to a level where a brand can build a Tamil-first campaign for Tamil Nadu viewers watching Tamil content, with its own creative, its own message, its own budget, rather than a leftover slice of the Hindi plan. The infrastructure to stop treating regional audiences as an afterthought already exists.

There is also a measurement argument that brand teams tend to skip.

mFilterIt's IVT data has repeatedly shown that fraud and low-quality inventory concentrate where scrutiny is lowest, and regional inventory has historically gotten less attention from verification and brand safety teams than premium Hindi and English slots. If regional is where the growth is, it needs the same rigor applied to it that Hindi GEC gets, not less.

None of this is an argument for abandoning Hindi- or English-led plans. It is an argument for building a regional language strategy as its own line, with its own creative brief, its own targeting logic, and its own success metrics, instead of a translation pass tacked onto the main plan. The brands that treat regional CTV audiences as a distinct, high-intent market rather than a footnote are the ones that will own that attention before it becomes obvious to everyone else that they should have.

The audience is already there, already watching, already choosing regional content over the alternatives available to it. The only open question left is whether a brand's media plan is built to reach that audience on purpose, or whether it just catches them by accident, the way it always has.

Category:Expert Tips

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8/4/2026|By Sonal Bhardwaj

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