For years India’s entertainment and media business has been a numbers game, more subscribers, more downloads, more eyeballs. That era is quietly ending. PwC India’s latest Global Entertainment and Media Outlook makes the shift explicit: the industry is moving from scale to sustainable value, and the money is following.
The headline number is striking. India’s E&M market is projected to grow from $25.7 bn in 2025 to $36.7 bn by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 7.4 per cent, nearly double the global industry’s 4 per cent pace. In an era when most mature media markets are grinding out low single-digit growth, India stands out as one of the few large economies where the media business is still genuinely expanding rather than merely reshuffling.
What is driving it tells its own story. Internet advertising remains the undisputed engine room, expected to nearly double from $7.5 bn to $14.3 bn by 2030 at a blistering 13.9 per cent CAGR, powered by search and video formats. OTT is maturing fast too, growing from $2.2 bn to $3.6 bn, but the interesting bit is not the size, it is the shift in emphasis. Platforms are done chasing subscriber counts for their own sake and are now squeezing harder on advertising-supported tiers, retention and revenue per user. Gaming and e-sports, smaller but scrappier, are set to climb from $1.5 bn to $2.6 bn as in-game advertising and sponsorship-led formats mature.
Sethi, partner and leader for media, entertainment and sports at PwC India, frames it well: India has already proven it can build audience scale, the harder task now is converting that engagement into durable value. Artificial intelligence sits at the centre of that pivot, reshaping everything from de-ageing and multilingual voice modelling to personalisation and generative engine optimisation. This is not AI as gimmick, it is AI as plumbing, quietly reworking how content gets made, discovered and monetised.
Two other trends deserve attention, precisely because they buck the global script. Traditional television and newspapers, written off elsewhere, are proving stubbornly resilient in India, with TV revenue edging up from $7.2 bn to $7.5 bn and print from $3.0 bn to $3.5 bn, buoyed by regional audiences and advertiser trust that digital has not fully displaced. Meanwhile connectivity, the unglamorous infrastructure layer, is quietly becoming the sector’s biggest single line item, projected to leap from $36.5 bn to $58.6 bn as fibre, broadband and 5G expand the addressable audience for everything built on top.
Add it up and the picture is of an industry maturing in real time. Regional language content is unlocking audiences that pan India platforms once ignored, premium live experiences are teaching Indian consumers to pay for exclusivity, and technology is doing the unglamorous work of turning attention into revenue. The next phase of growth, as PwC notes, will belong to companies that pair innovation with operational discipline and consumer trust. For an industry long defined by chasing scale, that is a genuinely encouraging change of script.
