Mukesh Ambani says Jio and Disney are together rewriting the global storybook of entertainment

Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) chairman Mukesh Ambani has said that Jio’s partnership with Disney marks the dawn of a new era in digital storytelling. “We have created JioHotstar with the ambition of equalling ─ even surpassing ─ the impact of leading creators of entertainment globally,” Ambani said in his keynote address at WAVES 2025.

Ambani, the richest man in the country, said JioHotstar will provide a platform for the best and the brightest talent from India and abroad. “Its technology stack is unrivalled,” he said.

The RIL chairman said Jio has made a leading contribution to India’s digital and entertainment revolution by making high-speed internet affordable and available to all. “With JioCinema, we have broken viewership records, revolutionized IPL streaming, and made immersive, multi-language, interactive sports viewing a global standard,” he said.

Ambani said India’s world-class digital infrastructure, built on 5G, will soon be elevated to 6G. The 1.2 billion mobile phones in India are potentially 1.2 billion screens, on which users can access entertainment ─ and even share user-generated content, he said.

“India is now amongst the world’s most populous nation. Soon, our economy will become the third largest globally. This will potentially make India the world’s largest media and entertainment market. Just look at the numbers. 1.4 billion creators and consumers, with an average age of 29. This is not just a statistic. It is the profile of a demographic, economic and creative superpower,” he explained.

The RIL chairman said Indian VFX is now powering Hollywood blockbusters. “We produce several million hours of content every year — films, TV series, music, sports, short-form, long-form, live and immersive content. We are multilingual, multi-format, and multi-platform by design,” he said.

Artificial Intelligence and other digital technologies are proving to be even more disruptive for the creative industry, according to Ambani. These technologies are transforming the entire value chain from content creation to distribution and monetisation. AI tools are dissolving the barriers between dream and reality, between imagination and execution,” said Ambani.

“They can make good content a thousand times more captivating… and also take them simultaneously to hundreds of millions of screens in cinema halls, homes and on mobile phones and computers across geographies and languages. What AI is doing to entertainment now is a million times more revolutionary than when silent camera and cinema was taking cinema to people a hundred years ago. In this fast-changing scenario, India has almost unbeatable advantages. The first is content; the second is demography; and the third is technology leadership,” he added.

“We are living in an era of Global Media Renaissance when two tectonic shifts have changed the landscape of creative industries globally. The first is geo-economic and the other is technological. The economic power of the Global South, which accounts for about 85% of the world’s population, is rising rapidly,” Ambani said, adding that this means, most of the creation and consumption of media and entertainment products will now start taking place in Asia, Africa and South America.