YouTube Goes Long: Is India’s Streaming Turf Up For Grabs?

Balaji Telefilms is taking five scripted series, spanning 200 episodes, directly to YouTube. The shows will be produced in 4K, with Ekta Kapoor leading the creative vision and retaining the intellectual property, while YouTube will provide distribution and monetisation through advertising and brand deals.

It is a markedly different proposition from the YouTube that Indian audiences have historically associated with creator-led, open-access video.

Samay Raina's India's Got Latent offers another indication of where the platform is headed. When Season 2 was launched on June 20, it was available simultaneously on two platforms, Netflix and YouTube. By June 25, the first episode had crossed 45 million views on YouTube, while Netflix's then-current Top 10 data showed about 2.2 million views. The two numbers are not directly comparable because the platforms use different viewing metrics, but the gap illustrated the scale that open distribution can offer.

The experiment has since taken another turn. Netflix made an episode featuring actor Varun Dhawan, released on September 4, exclusive to its platform. That means the same franchise has already been split across an open, advertising-led platform and a subscription service.

The question, therefore, is not whether YouTube is becoming Netflix. It is whether the definition of a streaming platform is changing as YouTube moves deeper into professionally produced, long-form entertainment.

YouTube’s Long-Form Play

The Balaji deal is not an isolated India experiment.

In January, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan described creators as the “new stars & studios” and said creators were building studio-sized operations and producing television-scale programming. YouTube's 2026 strategy spans long-form video, Shorts, music, livestreams and podcasts across devices, including television screens. Mohan also said YouTube had been the No. 1 streaming service in U.S. watch time for nearly three years, according to Nielsen.

The strategy is effectively an expansion of what YouTube can be. The platform is not moving away from creator-led video or Shorts. Instead, it is trying to make the creator ecosystem capable of producing and distributing a wider range of entertainment, including professionally produced, long-form programming.

India is an important part of that push because YouTube already has enormous reach here. In May 2025, YouTube said more than 15,000 Indian channels had crossed one million subscribers and that it had paid more than ₹21,000 crore to Indian creators, artists and media companies over the preceding three years.

The platform is now trying to take that creator economy further into the living room.

YouTube said in December 2025 that the number of channels earning six figures or more from television screens had risen by more than 45% in a year. In India, it reached more than 75 million adults on connected TV in April 2025.

The connected-TV opportunity is expanding beyond YouTube's own audience claims. Ormax Media estimates that India's connected-TV audience increased from 129.2 million in 2025 to 206.9 million in 2026, a 60% rise in one year.

For YouTube, that changes the proposition for studios. Long-form programming is no longer confined to phones and laptops. A show produced for YouTube can now be positioned for the same living-room screen on which viewers already consume television and subscription streaming.

Saurabh Shrivastava, COO-Digital at Shemaroo Entertainment, said CTV creates an opportunity for premium, advertising-funded content because it combines the viewing environment of television with digital targeting and measurement.

“The larger opportunity is the convergence of television and digital viewing,” he said.

Neeraj Sharma, MD, Communications, Media & Technology at Accenture in India, cautioned that the screen itself does not determine whether an audience is premium.

“This does not necessarily diminish the opportunity for premium content. Rather, it suggests that audience quality can no longer be inferred from screen type alone,” he said.

The long-form push also has a precedent beyond television.

YouTube said in February 2025 that more than one billion people were monthly active viewers of podcast content on the platform and that YouTube had become the most frequently used podcast service in the U.S.

That matters because podcasts were once associated more closely with specialist audio platforms such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts. YouTube has been able to turn its existing audience, recommendation systems and advertising infrastructure into a distribution layer for another long-form format.

For producers, the attraction is not simply reach. It is the possibility of retaining the underlying content asset while using YouTube for distribution and monetisation.

That is the structure Balaji is testing. YouTube says Ekta Kapoor will retain the intellectual property while it provides monetisation pathways through advertising and brand deals.

The commercial terms of the Balaji arrangement have not been disclosed. YouTube's standard Watch Page monetisation policy says eligible partners receive 55% of net advertising revenue from ads on public videos, but that is a platform-wide benchmark and does not establish the terms negotiated with Balaji.

For Sharma, retaining IP can become increasingly important as producers explore multiple distribution arrangements.

“Producers are increasingly exploring ways to retain ownership of libraries, formats and franchise rights while also evaluating different distribution and monetisation partnerships,” he said.

He added that ownership by itself does not determine who captures value.

“Discoverability, audience access, monetisation capabilities and data insights remain important sources of leverage within the value chain.”

That makes the Balaji arrangement less about abandoning subscription platforms and more about giving the producer another route to market.

Shrivastava sees a similar shift.

“YouTube is increasingly evolving from a discovery platform into a serious distribution ecosystem for premium content,” he said. “However, I don't see YouTube replacing subscription platforms. Rather, the market is moving towards a multi-platform model where content can be monetised differently across ecosystems.”

That distinction is important because the business YouTube is entering is already dealing with a different problem: how to make premium content pay.

The Premium Problem

India is not a market where premium content cannot find an audience. The problem is that audience scale does not always translate neatly into the economics required to fund expensive programming.

According to the FICCI-EY media and entertainment report, digital subscription revenues increased 60% in 2025 to ₹163 billion, while paid video subscriptions reached 216 million across 143 million households. Digital advertising also grew 26% to ₹947 billion.

The market, therefore, has both paying viewers and a large advertising pool. The challenge is deciding how much revenue a platform can extract from each audience segment relative to the cost of acquiring viewers and producing content.

Netflix's India experience illustrates that problem.

The company entered India in 2016 with a premium positioning, but its initial scale was considerably smaller than that of rivals. Netflix subsequently cut prices sharply in December 2021, taking its monthly plans to ₹149 for Mobile, ₹199 for Basic, ₹499 for Standard and ₹649 for Premium.

A decade after launch, Netflix has grown to more than 16 million subscribers and close to ₹4,000 crore in revenue, according to an earlier report by Business Standard. The report said the company had captured a relatively affluent, high-value segment of Indian streaming consumers while also looking for greater mass reach through sports, advertising and connected TVs.

The platform's content strategy has broadened as well. Netflix's 2026 India slate spans crime, thrillers, family dramas, comedy, romance and unscripted formats, alongside films and series in multiple languages.

The lesson is not that premium programming has failed. It is that a platform operating in India cannot rely on premium positioning alone if it wants the largest possible audience.

Amazon Prime Video is facing a similar monetisation question from another direction.

Mint reported in August 2025 that Prime Video's paid subscriber growth in India had plateaued at around 21 million, even as Amazon continued to describe India as an important growth market. At the same time, Amazon had introduced advertising into Prime Video and offered users a separate ad-free option.

In April 2026, another report by the publication said that Indian video-streaming platforms were increasingly moving towards combinations of advertising, subscriptions and pay-per-view rather than relying entirely on subscriptions. Notably, FICCI-EY data also showed strong growth in both subscription and digital advertising revenues.

JioHotstar illustrates the scale side of the equation.

The service says it now has around 500 million monthly average users and more than 300,000 hours of programming spanning films, originals, live sports, television and other formats.

But scale is expensive to build, especially when sports rights are involved.

Cricket remains central to Indian media economics. WPP Media data reported that cricket accounted for 89% of India's sports economy revenue in 2025.

The IPL rights auction in 2022 showed how aggressively India's largest media companies were willing to spend for that audience. Reliance's Viacom18 won the digital IPL rights, while Star retained the television rights. The subsequent merger of Reliance's and Disney's Indian media businesses brought JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar under the same JioStar umbrella.

YouTube has also explored the sports market itself. In 2022, Google-owned YouTube acquired the IPL bidding documents, although a BCCI official later said that it did not submit a bid.

Notably, Reuters reported during the regulatory review of that merger that the Competition Commission of India was also examining whether YouTube should be considered a competitor to subscription streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+. Reliance and Disney argued that YouTube's huge reach and licensed content justified treating it as part of the same broader competitive environment.

For YouTube, the attraction of long-form programming is therefore not simply that it can put a television-style show on a television screen. It already has an advertising business, a large user base and a distribution network. The question is whether those advantages can support the cost of professionally produced entertainment.

Shrivastava said title-level economics will remain decisive.

“Production costs, audience scale, ad inventory, fill rates and brand integrations all play a role in determining whether scripted fiction can sustainably operate on an advertising model,” he said.

That is why Balaji's experiment matters. It is testing whether a producer can retain the IP, use YouTube for distribution and advertising, and build an economic model without relying entirely on a conventional streaming licence.

But YouTube is not operating in a market where subscription platforms have disappeared.

Ormax Media's analysis of 126 theatrical films that crossed one million Indian theatrical footfalls in 2025 found Netflix had a 36% share of streaming rights overall and 57% for original Hindi-language films. The data suggests that Netflix remains a significant buyer of commercially valuable Indian content even as other distribution models expand.

This is why the emerging competition is not as simple as YouTube versus Netflix.

For a producer, the choice increasingly depends on what a particular title is meant to achieve. A subscription platform can offer a concentrated paying audience and exclusivity. YouTube can offer open distribution, advertising, discovery and connected-TV reach. Direct transactions can create another window.

Vishnu Mohta, co-founder of hoichoi and Logline AI, said the distinction between IP ownership and audience ownership is becoming less straightforward.

“For us, IP ownership and audience relationships are complementary parts of the same ecosystem,” he said.

That may be where the streaming market is heading. The value of a piece of content may no longer depend on finding one permanent platform for it. Producers can retain the underlying IP, distribute it through multiple windows and choose different ways of monetising the audience.

YouTube's long-form push is part of that shift. It is moving closer to professionally produced entertainment just as traditional streaming platforms are moving closer to advertising, broader reach and multiple forms of monetisation.

The contest, therefore, may not be over who gets to own one exclusive home for a show. It may be over who can capture the most value from the audience once the same piece of content can travel across screens, platforms and business models.