Weekly Viewership Data Shows Classic TV Formats Still Winning Inside India's OTT Era
Chrome OTT's latest weekly tracking data shows long-running television formats like Indian Idol and Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah still pulling top viewership even inside streaming platforms.
It has become common industry shorthand to describe streaming as having "replaced" television in India, but the most recent weekly viewership data complicates that story in an interesting way. Chrome OTT's tracking data for Week 19 of 2026 shows JioHotstar's premium TV catch-up service reaching a peak penetration of 94.05 percent among tracked viewers — but the individual titles driving that reach are, notably, not new streaming-first originals.
Indian Idol Season 16 topped the overall reach chart with a 3.88 percent share, translating to roughly 5.97 million viewers, followed closely by the long-running sitcom Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah at a 2.12 percent reach and around 3.25 million viewers. In the reality and entertainment catch-up segment specifically, the dating series Splitsvilla S16 led with a 5.56 percent reach (8.56 million viewers), with the celebrity cooking format Laughter Chefs Season 3 close behind at 4.02 percent (6.18 million viewers), and the daily drama Anupama rounding out the top tier with a 2.26 percent reach.
Editorial view: This data is a useful corrective to the assumption that streaming has simply displaced television-style content in India — it hasn't. What it has done is move the same dependable, long-running formats onto new distribution rails, where they continue to out-perform much of the streaming-first slate around them. For anyone commissioning or producing content in this market, including us, the lesson is straightforward: format durability and audience trust are still beating novelty on a week-to-week basis, and that's unlikely to change just because the delivery mechanism has.
