'As you're watching the IPL live, there's a conscious effort to showcase the entertainment portfolio.'
JioStar is India's second largest media company after Google. It was born in November 2024 after the merger of Viacom18 and Star India, owned by Reliance Industries/Bodhi Tree Systems, and The Walt Disney Company respectively.
The Rs 26,000 crore (Rs 260 billion) firm's merged app, JioHostar, just hit 200 million subscribers.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar/Business Standard spoke to Kiran Mani, CEO, digital, JioStar, in a Zoom interview, on what this means.
How many subscribers did JioHotstar have before it began streaming the IPL on March 22?
When we merged (in November 2024), we had roughly 45 million subscribers. Both the platforms were delivering about 180 million to 200 million monthly active users.
JioHotstar was born on February 14 this year. We have averaged over 300 million active users and are sitting at well over 100 million plus subscribers.
(Editor's note - The figure is about 200 million of which about 41 million are direct. The rest have come through telco partnerships across Jio, Airtel and others, say analysts.)
Historically Disney+Hotstar subscriber numbers spike during the IPL and then fall. How sustainable is this rise?
How do you define sustainability? For the past 18 seasons, India has had a watershed moment every year in the form of IPL.
The key is to make sure that in viewership, concurrency and number of subscriptions, we attain a peak that expands the market to a new normal.
This IPL, we have hit all those three. The Champions Trophy preceded IPL.
It expanded viewership with a concurrency of about 61.5 million, the highest for any sport on a single day.
The IPL opening day weekend saw a 40 per cent jump over last year's opening weekend to 137 million views.
On TV, it had a 39 per cent jump in ratings. We also measure how many people who come from sports watch a piece of content.
We are seeing 35 to 40 per cent jump on those numbers.
Is there conscious funnelling of this audience or is it happening organically?
If you've come to watch cricket, we want you to know that our content library is much larger than Netflix. As you're watching the IPL live, there's a conscious effort to showcase the entertainment portfolio.
When you say larger than Netflix, it is because the whole linear TV library is also here?
Yes. All of that is premium content.
There has been this ideal of blending linear TV and streaming metrics. Where is JioHostar on that?
This time we have partnered with Nielsen to provide an industry standard metric which allows advertisers to look at what they buy on TV and what they buy on digital as one seamless media buy.
And you are able to see 'I bought X GRPs (gross rating points) on TV, I bought Y impressions on digital but collectively how many audiences did I reach and at what frequency.'
What are the three big things that stand out in these first weeks of JioHotstar?
One, the notion that sports has matured. Sport still has so much more potential in India. Two, content is travelling away from its core market.
For example, Hindi and Tamil are the top two languages in which Malayalam content is watched. Three, the power of the library.
What are the big challenges as you scale up?
Can we build an ecosystem where value transfers start to happen in a sustainable way across the board? At this point of time, I don't see that.
I see a content ecosystem whose expectations are completely broken from what the monetisation outcomes are.
The feeling is that some rich company or some rich man will keep on funding this industry.
And having a non-profitable, non-sustainable business is okay.
The content industry is five years future forward; the economics is five years future backwards.
And I think at some stage we've got to bring these together.
Any big content announcement post IPL?
The post-IPL scenario is uncharted territory. But we are comfortable because we have nine months of sports on the platform. We'll have an entertainment calendar.
We had announced Sparks, a new platform that brings together 20 top content creators. We have our live events calendar.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
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