The Big Screen Shift: Why Bharat is Skipping TVs for Projectors This IPL

Jalandhar, Punjab

The tractors are parked early.

Dinner is rushed. Plates cleared before they should be. Phones buzz. A voice cuts through the courtyard—“Match shuru ho gaya kya?” (Has the match started?)

Inside, the living room is in motion. A wall has been cleared. Furniture dragged aside. Two men balance on stools, measuring, re-measuring, arguing over inches. “Thoda aur left…haan, bas.” (A little more to the left… that’s it.)

It looks like a television is about to go up. A big one.

On nights like this—when the Punjab Kings are playing—nothing small will do. The screen has to command the room. Neighbours walk in unannounced. More chairs appear. The match is never watched alone.

The box arrives. It's large, carefully handled and expensive. They don’t mount it on the wall but set it down on a table.

A pause. A click. The lights dim and the wall bursts into colour. A green field, red jerseys and the crowd rising...the match goes live—not on a television, but on a projector. In a farming household in Punjab, on an IPL night, the big-screen upgrade isn’t hanging on the wall anymore. It’s being thrown onto it.

NOT JUST ONE HOUSE

It doesn’t stop at one living room.

Across Punjab, similar scenes are playing out. In villages outside Ludhiana, in homes across Amritsar, Jalandhar—spaces where the wall is wide, the room is shared, and the screen is meant to be experienced together.

And it isn’t just Punjab. Travel south, and the pattern sharpens.

In Andhra Pradesh, cinema isn’t just entertainment—it’s culture. Theatres are temples. The experience is part of daily life. And now, that experience is moving home. Not into compact apartments, but into independent houses across tier II and III towns.

Here, a television doesn’t always cut it. The screen isn’t big enough. The experience isn’t immersive enough. And more importantly—it’s fixed.

Projectors solve for all three: They scale. They move. They transform the room. And increasingly, they’re not cheap.

BenQ, for instance, sells home projectors in the ₹2 lakh to ₹7 lakh range in India. What’s striking isn’t just the price. It’s the buyer: Not just metros but Bharat.

THE BEHAVIOUR SHIFT

For decades, the television defined the living room.

It was fixed, anchored and non-negotiable. Furniture arranged around it. Walls designed for it. Even conversations paused for it.

The projector flips that logic. It doesn’t demand a space. It adapts to it. Project onto a wall. A ceiling. A temporary screen. Move it from room to room. Pack it away. Bring it back. For a generation that has grown up on mobile screens—where content follows you, not the other way around—that flexibility matters. “The millennial consumer is mobile-first,” says Rajeev Singh, managing director of BenQ India & South Asia. “They don’t want something fixed like a TV.”

It’s not just about watching. It’s about how you watch: Alone on a phone and together on a wall. The shift isn’t from small to big. It’s from fixed to fluid. “We’ve seen a 50% spike in projector sales ahead of the IPL,” says Singh.

For years, projectors stayed niche for a reason. They were clunky, installation-heavy, and dependent on perfect conditions—often needing a separate room, controlled lighting, and fixed setups.

That barrier is now collapsing. Newer projectors don’t need a screen. They auto-adjust to surfaces—walls, ceilings and uneven textures. Built-in AI corrects angles, sharpens images and avoids obstacles. You don’t install them. You switch them on. What used to require a home theatre now fits on a table or in a bag.

For companies like BenQ, is a category bet.

The company already leads India’s premium projector segment, particularly in 4K—devices that can cost anywhere between ₹2 lakh and ₹7 lakh. A niche, on paper. But one that is expanding quietly through behaviour, through aspiration and through a simple question playing out in homes like the one in Punjab: If the wall can become the screen, why fix one to it?

THE WALL FIGHTS BACK

The television isn’t going quietly.

Over the last few years, TVs have been getting bigger, sharper, cheaper. Screens that once felt extravagant—55-inch, 65-inch—are now mainstream. Even 75-inch and 85-inch panels are creeping into upper-middle-class homes.

And they’re getting smarter. 4K is standard. 8K is emerging. Streaming is built-in, setup is effortless and prices are falling.

For most households, the television still wins on convenience. Switch it on and it works. There is no dimming of lights, no adjusting surfaces and no moving parts.

Meanwhile, TV makers aren’t dismissing projectors but they’re not losing sleep over them either.

Inside a TV company, the view is pragmatic: projectors solve for size and novelty, TVs solve for everything else. Brightness in real-world lighting, plug-and-play ease, consistent picture quality, falling price points—these remain hard advantages. The bigger screens get cheaper, the gap narrows further. What projector brands are really doing, executives argue, is expanding the “large-screen” habit—something TV makers are more than happy to capture with 75, 85, even 100-inch panels. The response, then, isn’t defensive. It’s acceleration—pushing larger sizes, sharper displays, and smarter features deeper into the mass market, before projectors can move beyond their niche.

“Projectors sell the idea of a big screen. We sell the reality of one,” says chief marketing officer of one of the top MNC TV brands in India. "You can fight, but you can't replace us," he says, requesting anonymity.  

That's why, for now, the projector isn’t replacing the TV. It’s sitting beside it as a second screen, a bigger screen and a more occasional screen. And this could be for match nights, movie nights or gatherings. All are moments that need scale.

WHERE THE PROJECTOR WINS

But every category shift doesn't start as a replacement but an addition.

Then, slowly, the centre shifts. Projectors are not trying to outdo televisions at everything. They’re choosing where televisions fall short. Size, without limits. Mobility, without installation. And Experience, without permanence.

In markets like Andhra Pradesh, where cinema is culture, the appeal is obvious. In Punjab, where gatherings are routine, the social experience matters as much as the screen itself.

And in a generation that doesn’t want to commit to a fixed setup, flexibility becomes a feature—not a compromise. The projector doesn’t demand a wall. It takes over whatever surface you give it.

For BenQ, this is where India starts to look less like a market and more like a signal. Premium isn’t confined to metros, aspiration in Bharat doesn’t always follow traditional categories and behaviour can leap ahead of assumptions.

India is already among BenQ’s largest markets globally. In segments like 4K projectors, it holds a dominant position. And increasingly, demand is coming from places that don’t typically lead premium adoption.

It's not Mumbai or Delhi but places like Vijayawada and Ludhiana. It's not top cities but tier II and III, places where the wall is bigger and the appetite for experience is, too.

WHY TVs STILL WIN & WHAT COULD CHANGE

Now, this brings us to a bigger question: What could be the tipping point for the category? Can projectors take on televisions?

From a retail lens, projectors still face an uphill battle in India.

Here’s why. The market is wired for immediacy—walk in, compare screens side by side, take one home, plug it in, and it just works. “TVs fit that behaviour perfectly,” says Ashita Aggarwal, professor of marketing at SP Jain Institute of Management & Research. Projectors, on the other hand, ask for a little patience—dimmer rooms, some setup, a bit of trial and error.

That friction shows up on the shop floor. Sales staff default to TVs because they’re easier to demonstrate and easier to close. Add to that aggressive pricing on larger TV sizes, easy financing, and strong brand trust, and the choice tilts quickly. Projectors may win curiosity, even the occasional upgrade purchase, but in a market that rewards convenience and certainty, TVs still convert faster and more often, adds Aggarwal.

Still, something is changing. Not immediately. Not entirely. But the direction is shifting.

As technology removes friction, as prices move within reach, as behaviour tilts toward flexibility—the gap begins to close. While the television is still the default, the projector is becoming the alternative. And in some homes, quietly, it is already becoming the upgrade.

Back in the living room in Punjab, the match builds.

A boundary flies, the room erupts, someone stands and someone shouts. More people squeeze in. The wall holds. There is no flicker, no interruption. Just the game—larger than it would have ever been on a television.

Outside, the fields stretch into the dark. Inside, the screen isn’t fixed anymore. It’s wherever the moment needs it to be.