Hemant Ruprell: Indian Television Is Not Dying; It Is Learning To Live On Every Screen

Every few years, Indian television is declared to be in decline. Streaming was supposed to end it. Short video was expected to make long-form programming impossible. On-demand viewing appeared to have killed off the habit of families gathering at a fixed hour.

Hemant Ruprell doesn't buy it. As co-founder of Frames Production Company, a Mumbai-based house that makes reality and dance shows for both television and OTT platforms, he's spent more than two decades betting that the two mediums can keep growing side by side rather than one cannibalising the other, and that's also, not coincidentally, the argument he now makes publicly: the audience never actually left television, it simply changed the terms on which it expects entertainment to reach it.

"The more useful description is evolution, not decline," Ruprell says. Viewers today spread their attention across television, OTT platforms, social media and vertical-video feeds: watching a reality-show performance with family, finishing a streaming episode alone, and slipping in several short clips in between. Total demand for stories, humour, competition and human connection, he argues, remains as strong as ever. What has actually weakened is a producer's ability to assume where that attention will land.

The numbers partly back that up. Television households in India are projected to grow from around 190 million in 2024 to 214 million by 2026, even as the country's OTT audience has separately climbed past 600 million people, or roughly 41 percent of the population, according to Ormax Media's 2025 OTT Audience Report. Connected TV, streaming content on a television set rather than a phone, grew 23 percent in the first quarter of 2026 alone. So the two mediums aren't simply swapping places; both are expanding, often into the same households. That's consistent with what Ruprell is arguing, though it's also the outcome that best suits a producer who needs both mediums to keep working.

Ruprell has spent years producing non-fiction and fiction at Frames, and says the experience has taught him that audiences owe no format their loyalty. Preferences shift with platform, region, age and social mood. Content that once leaned heavily on suffering and dramatic rags-to-riches arcs, he suggests, can now come across as manipulative to viewers who increasingly favour humour, practicality and recognisable imperfection.

Emotion still sits at the centre of Indian entertainment, Ruprell maintains, but authenticity now matters more than raw sentiment. He describes how, in reality television, producers construct situations designed to let contestants reveal themselves, researching their backgrounds, identifying key relationships, and helping judges ask questions that open up a genuine conversation. What happens after that, he stresses, cannot be fully engineered: one contestant turns emotional, another responds with humour, a third grows defensive.

The role of the host, in Ruprell's telling, is more consequential than it gets credit for. A strong host does more than announce rules or shepherd a show between segments; they translate the format itself for the audience watching at home. He points to Akshay Kumar's role in the Indian adaptation of Wheel of Fortune, arguing that the actor's energy and instinct for family interaction turn an imported structure into something that speaks a local emotional language, even as the game mechanics stay recognisable.

That kind of adaptation, Ruprell says, is why licensed international formats need not become cultural imitations. A format may protect certain structural elements by contract, but the narration around it can still reflect Indian relationships and sensibilities, with more room given to family, celebration, humour and personal history than a Western original might allow.

India's regional markets sharpen this point further, in Ruprell's view. A dance competition, he notes, can keep the same rules across its Hindi, Bengali and southern editions while feeling like an entirely different show in its music, humour, language and contestant storytelling. Regional audiences, he argues, want cultural fluency, not a national programme dressed in local costumes.

He also thinks the industry is too dependent on imported formats generally. Satellite television arrived in India only after Western markets had already built a mature format-development and licensing ecosystem, he points out, so buying proven concepts made early sense as a way to reduce risk. But he argues an industry of India's scale shouldn't stay permanently reliant on ideas packaged elsewhere. It's a position that also happens to describe Frames' own business model: the company has built much of its output, including “Dance Plus”, “Hip Hop India”, “India’s Best Dancer” and "Super Dancer," on formats developed in-house rather than licensed from abroad, so Ruprell is arguing, in part, for a market that rewards the bet his own company already made.

The rise of vertical content, Ruprell says, poses another creative test. A twenty-second episode may look like it has little in common with a prime-time reality show, but both, in framing, still have to establish a promise, build momentum and reward the viewer's attention. His advice to producers is to study the grammar of the new format on its own terms, rather than assume every long-form idea can simply be chopped into fragments.

He's also careful to separate visibility from guaranteed fame. Reality shows, he says, give contestants a platform, but what follows depends on ability, effort, choices, luck and circumstances no producer controls. He cites Raghav Juyal's path from contestant to host as proof of what's possible, while cautioning against turning it into a promise made to every participant. "Responsible entertainment offers access, not certainty," he says.

Ratings are useful, Ruprell argues, because they let teams learn and adjust, sometimes week to week. But he thinks constant reaction to the numbers can tip into panic, and that producers need the confidence to tell constructive feedback from noise. More broadly, he wants the industry to count cultural recognition, regional representation and new career pathways as forms of success too, not just ratings dominance.

Not everyone in the industry would frame the moment as generously. Linear television's share of overall ad spend has been ceding ground to digital for years even where household reach holds up, and independent producers who bet on original, in-house formats, as Frames has, generally take on more financial risk upfront than those licensing a format with a proven track record elsewhere. Ruprell's confidence that the industry can out-innovate its own disruption reflects the vantage point of someone who has run that experiment inside his own company for over a decade, not a neutral read on where every player in Indian television currently stands. Whether it holds for producers with less appetite for that risk is a separate question his essay doesn't really address.