Media and entertainment in India: what the numbers say about jobs, growth and where to start

Media and entertainment is the industry almost every graduate in India consumes for hours a day and almost none has looked at as an employer. It makes the films, series, news, music, games and advertising that fill those hours, it is worth ₹2.78 lakh crore, and it is in the middle of the biggest shift in its history: in 2025 digital media became larger than television for the first time. Most of the advice about media careers was written for the industry that existed before that shift.

This report answers three questions with numbers that can be checked: which part of the sector is actually growing, what each job optimises for, and which skills the sector is currently short of. Everything below comes from the FICCI-EY media and entertainment report, TRAI and government releases, company filings and published admission and recruitment notices, with the period stated. Start with the one-page brief.

1. Why look at this sector at all

Four things make media and entertainment worth a serious look, and one should give you pause.

It is large and still growing faster than the economy. Indian media and entertainment grew 9% to ₹2.78 lakh crore in 2025, according to the FICCI-EY report released on 24 March 2026, and it directly employs about 27.5 lakh people, with more than one crore more employed indirectly. Few industries of this size grew that fast in the same year.

The audience is enormous and moving online. India's OTT audience was 66.5 crore people in 2026, up from 60.1 crore a year earlier, on the Ormax OTT Audience Report 2026. Connected-TV viewing, streaming on the living-room television, grew 60% in a year to 20.7 crore people. Every one of those viewers is watching something that somebody wrote, shot, edited, dubbed, scheduled or sold advertising against.

Work is coming in from the rest of the world. Prime Focus, which owns the visual effects company DNEG, grew revenue 30% in FY26 to ₹4,676 crore, much of it from international films and series produced in India. FICCI-EY counts more than one lakh creative professionals in the global capability centres of media companies in India, working in VFX, animation, gaming, localisation and immersive media.

The government has made skills a priority. The Union Budget 2026-27 announced AVGC content creator labs in 15,000 secondary schools and 500 colleges, supported by the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies in Mumbai, whose first campus opened in July 2025. The budget speech said the animation, visual effects, gaming and comics sector is projected to need 20 lakh professionals by 2030.

And the caution: the old core is shrinking. Linear television advertising fell 10% in 2025, and pay DTH lost 75 lakh subscribers in the year to June 2026, on TRAI data. A sector can grow 9% in total and still be cutting jobs in its largest traditional business. Where you join inside it matters more here than in almost any industry in this series.

2. How big it is, and how fast it is really growing

Start with a distinction that separates people who have read about this sector from people who understand it. You will see projections quoted in almost every article on Indian media, such as the sector reaching ₹3.3 lakh crore by 2028. That figure comes from FICCI-EY and it is a projection. It has not been measured. Quoting it as though it describes the sector today is the fastest way to lose an interviewer.

What has actually been measured is revenue by segment, and FICCI-EY publishes it every March. In 2025 the sector earned ₹2.78 lakh crore. Digital media earned ₹1.11 lakh crore, television ₹61,700 crore and print about ₹25,900 crore. Advertising across all media was ₹1.5 lakh crore, of which digital took 63%. Those are the numbers that decide where budgets, and therefore jobs, go.

The second measured thing, and the more important one for a career, is the gap between reaching people and being paid by them. India does not have one media market. It has a very wide audience that narrows sharply at the point of payment, and each narrowing is a different business with different jobs.

The third measured thing is direction, and here the sector splits in two. Television is contracting: linear TV advertising fell 10% in 2025, and pay DTH subscribers dropped from 5.61 crore in June 2025 to 4.86 crore in June 2026. Digital is rising: digital advertising grew 26% to ₹94,700 crore, and paid OTT subscriptions grew 16% in a year.

There is a third movement underneath both, and it is the one that changes where the jobs are. People are paying more to be in the room. Live events grew 44% to ₹14,500 crore in 2025, and box office revenue reached a record ₹13,395 crore even though cinema footfalls fell 6%, because each ticket cost more. A sector can lose viewers on one screen and gain revenue from people willing to leave home.

3. Who leads, who is stuck, and what that tells you

This is the most useful table in the report if you are choosing an employer, and it starts with a fact that surprises almost everyone. Indian media is dominated by one company. JioStar, formed when Reliance's Viacom18 and Disney's Star India merged on 14 November 2024, earned revenue from operations of ₹30,819 crore in FY26 in its audited accounts. That is more than the next five listed media companies in this report combined.

The reason is structural: JioStar owns the rights to the most-watched sport, the largest television network and the largest streaming platform, Jio's parent group behind it, and the scale to spread the cost of cricket rights across all three. What follows is the organised, reported part of the sector. Treat it as a map of where professional hiring happens, not as a ranking of quality.

Two patterns are worth carrying into any conversation about this sector. The first is that owning content beats distributing it. Tips Music earned ₹376 crore and kept ₹217 crore of it as profit. Dish TV earned three times as much revenue and lost ₹807 crore. A music catalogue earns every time a song is streamed; a DTH platform has to keep paying for satellites, set-top boxes and the channels it carries while its customers leave.

The second is that the businesses people choose to pay for are doing better than the businesses people pay for by habit. Cinemas, live events and streaming grew. Pay television, which many homes kept only because it came with the television, shrank fastest. That divide runs through the rest of this report.

4. Where the growth actually sits

Here is the pattern that matters most for anyone joining. In FY26 the media businesses that grew were not the ones with the largest audiences. They were the ones selling something people actively chose, a ticket, a subscription or a piece of work for a global client, rather than a channel bundled into a monthly bill.

Averaging those groups makes the point sharper. The content and services businesses, Prime Focus and Tips, grew about 25%. The cinema and broadcast businesses ranged from a small decline at Zee to 16% growth at PVR INOX. The DTH platforms fell between 13% and 26%. This is not a story about good companies and bad companies. It is a story about which revenue models survived the move to streaming.

Underneath the companies, the fastest-growing segment of all is one most graduates do not think of as a career. Live events, concerts, festivals, sport and ticketed experiences, grew 44% in 2025 to ₹14,500 crore, and FICCI-EY projects ₹19,600 crore by 2028. Music grew 10% to ₹5,900 crore, with paid music subscriptions up 37% to 1.44 crore. Out-of-home advertising grew 13%. Meanwhile the government is building the training pipeline: the Union Budget 2026-27 speech announced AVGC content creator labs in 15,000 schools and 500 colleges.

5. How a story reaches an audience, and the jobs that do it

Indian media is not one business. It is four stages, from the idea to the screen and back to the money, and almost every entry-level role sits inside one of them. Knowing which stage you are applying to explains most of what the job will actually feel like.

The physical and institutional network behind the first two of those is large, and unusually for a creative industry, much of it is counted by the government because broadcasting and film certification are licensed.

Four terms run through every conversation in this sector, and candidates routinely get them wrong. Reach is the number of people who saw something at least once, and it is the number advertisers buy. MAU, monthly active users, is the number of people who used a platform in a month, and it is not the same as paying subscribers. ATP, average ticket price, is box office revenue divided by tickets sold, and it rose in 2025 while footfalls fell. Catalogue is the library of films, shows or songs a company owns the rights to, and it is the asset that keeps earning after the people who made it have moved on.

6. The digital shift, and the correction that followed it

This is the part of the sector that changed fastest, and the part where most students' mental model is out of date. In 2025 digital media earned ₹1.11 lakh crore and became larger than television, which earned ₹61,700 crore. Digital took 63% of all advertising. The streaming war of the early 2020s, with a dozen services spending to win subscribers, ended in consolidation, and it is worth seeing exactly how before you build a career plan around it.

The clearest single illustration of the consolidation is JioStar. When Reliance and Disney completed their merger on 14 November 2024, two of the largest streaming services became one, and JioHotstar launched on 14 February 2025. Reliance said in August 2025 that it had 30 crore paying subscribers, and in July to September 2026 it averaged about 44 crore monthly active users. In May 2026 Amazon folded its free service MX Player into Amazon's Prime Video. Fewer, larger platforms now commission most Indian streaming content, which changes who you pitch to and who you work for.

The technology story did not stop with streaming. It moved into regulation. On 10 February 2026 the government amended the IT Rules to require labels and metadata on AI-generated content, with effect from 20 February 2026, and cut the time platforms have to remove unlawful content to three hours. In the Delhi High Court, the news agency ANI's copyright case against OpenAI is now on appeal after an interim injunction was refused in July 2026. Several Indian studios are racing to release the first fully AI-generated feature film.

The career point. Creative craft, writing, editing, direction and design, still carries most of the jobs, and it is where most people should start. But the roles that combine craft with something else, audience data, rights, product or technology, are the ones currently short of people. That is because the platforms changed faster than any film or journalism school changed its syllabus.

7. How the money is made, and what you will be measured on

This section exists for one reason. Whatever role you take in media, your work will be judged by how it moves one of four blocks. People who can name the block they affect get promoted noticeably faster than people who cannot.

The number the sector is judged on is the operating margin, and the spread across Indian media businesses in FY26 is extraordinary. Companies selling entertainment to the same country produce margins that range from a large loss to nearly three-quarters of revenue.

Read that table as a warning about a single word. Audience in media does not automatically create margin, because the largest costs, content and distribution, are paid before anyone knows whether the audience will come. Margin arrives when a company owns something that keeps earning after it is made, a catalogue, a franchise or a long-running show, which is exactly what music labels and established regional broadcasters have and what new platforms are still building.

Two lines deserve precision because they shape day-to-day work. Content amortisation is how the cost of a film or series is spread over the years it earns, and a decision to write it off faster, as Zee did in FY26, can turn a profitable year into a weak one. Occupancy is the share of cinema seats actually sold, and PVR INOX reported 30.4% in the July to September 2026 quarter. If you join a cinema, an event company or a streaming service, expect to be measured on how full your inventory is long before you are measured on anything creative.

8. What is being built, and where

Announced money is the closest thing this sector has to a hiring forecast, and in media most of it is private. The public part is small but specific. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has a budget of ₹4,551.94 crore for 2026-27, up 4.4% on the 2025-26 budget estimate but about 25% below the revised estimate for that year, which included one-off spending. Of that, ₹2,291.88 crore goes to Prasar Bharati.

The single largest public project is a skills institution. The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies, approved by the Cabinet in 2024 which the government describes as the first of a family of institutions like the IITs and IIMs, opened its first campus at the NFDC complex in Mumbai on 18 July 2025, with 17signed letters of intent to work with it courses in gaming, post-production, animation, comics and extended reality and a first batch of 300 students. At the WAVES summit in Mumbai in May 2025, JioStar, Adobe, Google and YouTube, Meta and others signed agreements to work with it. For anyone considering animation or VFX as a career, it is the largest single public signal in the sector.

Private capital is being built at least as fast. FICCI-EY counts more than one lakh creative professionals in the India centres of global media companies. Prime Focus said its fourth-quarter growth was driven by tentpole projects including Ramayana. PVR INOX ended March 2026 with 1,798 screens in 359 cinemas across 113 cities. And JioStar's Indian Premier League coverage reached about 120 crore viewers across television and digital in 2026, on the company's own figures.

The traffic runs in both directions, and the reason is worth understanding. The same global work that brings VFX jobs to India also takes them away when a client fails. Technicolor's shutdown in 2025 displaced up to 2,000 VFX and animation professionals in Bengaluru, according to FICCI-EY. Global demand is real, but it is lumpy, and it is priced in dollars by clients who can move work to another country.

9. The rules you will work inside

Media and entertainment is regulated more heavily than most creative graduates expect, and by an unusually large number of separate bodies: the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting licenses channels and sets broadcasting policy, the Central Board of Film Certification certifies films, TRAI regulates television pricing, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology writes the IT Rules that govern platforms, and since May 2026 the Online Gaming Authority of India regulates games. You do not need to memorise them. You do need to know which one governs the job you are applying for, because that single fact determines what you will spend your time complying with.

Four rule changes have altered what the job looks like, and all four are live right now.

The mechanism is worth understanding once, because it explains most media news you will read. A law sets the direction, a ministry writes the rules, platforms implement, courts test them, and the statistics confirm it a year later. If you can place a news story on that chain, you can say something useful about it.

10. What could go wrong

Read this as a list of things to watch rather than reasons to stay away. Every risk here is documented in an official publication, the FICCI-EY report or a company filing, and most of them are also, from a career point of view, job descriptions. The Ormax box office report is worth reading alongside the company results, because it shows what audiences actually paid to see rather than what studios hoped they would.

The risk that media companies name most often in their own results is not audience. It is cost, and specifically the cost of content and rights that has to be paid before anyone knows whether the audience will come. That is the single most useful thing to keep in mind when you compare two job offers in this sector: ask which one can survive a bad year at the box office or a weak advertising market, because for several large employers in FY26 the answer was not obvious.

11. One company's year, in detail

PVR INOX runs multiplex cinemas across India, selling tickets, food and beverages, and on-screen advertising. It was formed when PVR and INOX Leisure merged in 2023, and it has spent the years since closing weak screens, opening better ones and raising what each visitor spends. FY26, the year to 31 March 2026, is the year that strategy showed in the results.

What it establishes. Cinema in India is not dying, but it is concentrating. Fewer people went to the cinema in 2025, yet the largest chain sold more tickets at higher prices, because audiences now go for large films in better screens. That contrast is the most useful thing in this report to be able to explain in an interview.

What it does not establish. One good year is not a track record. Cinema revenue depends on a handful of films the chain does not make, its profit in FY26 included a one-off gain, and occupancy of about 30% means most seats are still empty. Say all of that if you are asked. Being able to argue both sides of a company you admire is unusual in a graduate candidate.

12. Latest news

The sector restates itself every quarter. These are the developments from the last two quarters that have actually changed something, each with the date it happened.

13. The jobs themselves

Media hires into a small number of well-defined tracks, and the promise is real: you will be given a show, a campaign, a channel, a set of shots or a release to work on early, because production runs on deadlines and teams are small. The trade is that much of the work is project-based, entry pay in creative roles is modest, and the compensation for that arrives as credits and a portfolio rather than as salary.

One caveat before the tables. Admission routes, recruitment notices and pay change every cycle in this sector, and two of the best-known film schools changed their entrance systems in 2025. Always check the official notice rather than a coaching website, and check the year it was issued.

The public route, in detail

The route most candidates think of first is the Indian Information Service, which runs government communication through the Press Information Bureau and staffs parts of Doordarshan and Akashvani. Its Group A officers are recruited mainly through the UPSC Civil Services Examination. The 2026 examination was notified in February 2026 with about 933 vacancies across all services, and UPSC has scheduled the 2027 notification for 13 January 2027, with the preliminary examination on 23 May 2027. The notice does not break vacancies down by service, so the number of information service posts in a given year is a small part of that total.

The important and widely missed detail: Prasar Bharati recruits on contract, through short notices, not a single annual exam. In 2026 it advertised, among others, 20 marketing executive posts at ₹35,000 to ₹42,000 a month (up to ₹50,000 in metro cities) and four news anchor posts for experienced candidates at ₹1 lakh to ₹1.5 lakh a month. Notices appear on the Prasar Bharati vacancies page, often with only a few weeks to apply.

What the first year actually looks like

Whichever route you enter by, the first year is dominated by the same thing: deadlines. Even strategy, research and sales roles in good media companies start close to production, on a set, in an edit suite or a newsroom, and the people who skip it tend to plan content that cannot be made on the budget or the schedule.

The skills that actually get you hired

For the public route, selection is almost entirely the exam or the notice criteria: the Civil Services syllabus, or the experience and qualifications a Prasar Bharati notice asks for. Preparation is a known quantity, and the highest-return move is to decide early, because the Civil Services cycle is notified each January or February.

For everything else, three specific things pay off far more than general preparation. First, have a portfolio. A reel, a set of published pieces, a short film, a sound portfolio or a game build is the single largest factor in most private hiring decisions, far ahead of the degree. Second, learn to read the data the sector runs on. Read the summary of the latest FICCI-EY report and the free Ormax OTT and box office reports, and be able to say what they imply for the company you are applying to. The Media and Entertainment Skills Council publishes national qualification standards for roles such as animator and compositor, which is the most concrete description available of what studios expect at entry. Third, know one regulation properly, whichever one governs the role: the AI-content labelling rules if you work on digital platforms, the film certification rules if you work in film, or the online gaming rules if you want to work in games.

14. The numbers to learn, and what to do next

Eight terms carry specific meanings in this sector and are used loosely almost everywhere else. Knowing them precisely is the cheapest possible way to sound like someone who works in media rather than someone who has read about it.

What to do next. Six concrete steps, in the order they will actually help.

Every figure in this report is traceable to the FICCI-EY media and entertainment report, a TRAI or government publication, an Ormax Media report, a company's own results or filing, a budget document or a published admission or recruitment notice, with the period stated in the text. Data is current as of 6 November 2026. Industry-wide figures are published once a year for the previous calendar year, so treat anything undated as context rather than fact. If you are reading across this series, the telecommunications version of this report uses the same method on the networks that carry most of this content, and the wider careers library covers the roles named above in more depth.