JIOSTAR VICE CHAIRMAN Uday Shankar’s eighth-floor office in Maker Chambers, Mumbai, has a breathtaking view of the Arabian Sea. “I like to have an office with a view,” he says with a smile, standing at his sleek, ergonomic standing workstation. At 64, the media industry veteran prefers to stand while working; he is as agile and hungry to disrupt the industry as he was way back in 2008 when he took over as CEO of the erstwhile Star India. This time he wants to set a precedent not just for India but for the globe.

Shankar seldom operates out of the JioStar headquarters in Mumbai. His office is at Marigold Park Capital. Formerly Lupa Systems, Marigold Park Capital is a financial advisory founded by James Murdoch (CEO of erstwhile 21st Century Fox), through which he and Shankar co-founded a strategic investment platform, Bodhi Tree Systems. Shankar has a 7% stake in the ₹31,660-crore Reliance-Walt Disney Company-owned media conglomerate, JioStar. This time, Shankar has skin in the game, and that clearly comes across while he shares his strategy and vision for the business.

The architect of the mega $8.5-billion Reliance-Disney-Star merger deal (which came into force in November 2024), Shankar is known to have laid its foundation while he was still at the helm of Disney-Star in 2020. But it is in the office of Marigold Park Capital where the final touches of the deal were given. The Marigold Park eighth-floor conference room has been the site of myriad debates and conversations about the merger, as well as discussions on how to take the business forward after the merger.

Shankar is a habitual risk-taker. Be it the $2.55-billion bet on the Indian Premier League (IPL) back in 2018 (and another $1.11 billion for the ICC rights), producing sports content in expensive 4K format (against the wishes of most sports federations) in multiple languages or convincing the then Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger to launch Disney+ as Disney+Hotstar in India, he has always chosen the road not taken. The common link between him and the Ambanis (who own 63.16% of JioStar), he says, is their risk appetite.

Therefore, it was unlikely that he would run JioStar like a conventional media and entertainment business. The fact that the focus has moved away from linear television to digital and to connected TVs is obvious. “We didn’t want to be a JioCinema nor did we want to be a Hotstar. The brief was very simple — create something that is totally native and foundationed in today, and not yesterday.”

“Our view is very clear: we want to be ubiquitous, universal; we want to distribute through every channel and pipe that’s available.” That perhaps explains why Shankar doesn’t consider the likes of ZEE Entertainment and Sony Entertainment Television or even streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video competitors to JioStar anymore.

Why? To answer that, he turns to his favourite analogy from sports, where he has taken the maximum bets. “I have told my team not to look sideways. When you are running a race, you do not look at how one is running in the lanes adjacent. You just run your race to the best of your ability because you want to stay focussed on that. We were very clear we were not going to compete with any of the big global streaming services.”

So, who are its competitors? Google, YouTube, and Meta, pat comes his reply. “YouTube is the biggest TV in the U.S., not on account of their user-generated content. All the linear TV content seamlessly goes there. The viewers don’t care about where to watch content. All that they want is good content,” he explains.

When the $8.5-billion Reliance-Disney-Star merger — the biggest M&A deal in the media and entertainment industry — was announced in 2024, the final entity comprised a 60% share of the market. Industry leaders then said that the business of media and entertainment was all about high-quality content and even fringe players had an opportunity to survive if their content was attractive enough to gain consumer attention.

But Shankar no longer believes that content is king. “One of the first things that I realised during my own learning journey is that for most in the media industry, innovation is limited to creative or content renovation. But digital is not about content. Of course, content is what is important and what flows through it.”

Digital is as much about technology as it is about content, he clarifies. “If anything, technology had to lead content, not the other way around. And that learning is a very valuable insight. We’ve kept that at the centre at JioStar,” Shankar explains. Hence, it is technology that is calling the shots at JioStar. He describes the streaming platform, JioHotstar, as the most technologically advanced platform for media and entertainment anywhere in the world.

After all, life today is all about smartphones and connected TVs (CTV). No wonder the JioStar head honcho’s mission is to get into consumer mind-space not just through content but also through smart tech-led innovations.

His definition of being a technology platform is to serve consumers better. It is about producing content in 4K; it is about producing content in multiple languages; it is about offering uniqueness to his consumers if they are watching a match on their connected TV or on their mobile handsets. “No media company produces content in so many languages in the world. The Olympics gets produced only in four-five languages. We do 14-15 languages on any given day. It’s not just translation; all of them are original production. Our approach to delivering content and building engagement with our customers is totally different,” he says with pride.

THE MEGA MERGER

Shankar’s friends in the industry call him a savvy deal-maker. “He knew that Disney was not happy with the expensive bets (especially in sports) that the company had taken, and monetisation was becoming a challenge. Uday used that to his advantage,” says a close acquaintance of Shankar. While he was at Disney-Star, the acquaintance adds, he started work on this deal. “He already knew the Disney management quite well. Through the deal, Uday was treated as a shareholder, not a counterpart.” Prior to the Reliance and Disney-Star merger, Shankar, through Bodhi Tree, had picked up a 15% stake in Viacom18.

When The Walt Disney Company acquired 21st Century Fox for $71 billion in 2019, Star India was valued at $15 billion. Five years later, when the merger was announced with Reliance, the joint venture (Star India and Viacom18) was valued at $8.5 billion, which meant a sharp drop in the value of Disney-Star. Walt Disney had reported an equity loss of $103 million in the JV in the March 2025 quarter.

The entity’s most expensive investment so far has been IPL. For the 2023-27 cycle, Disney-Star bought the linear TV rights for ₹23,575 crore, while Viacom18 (Reliance) secured the digital rights for ₹23,758 crore. “Both Reliance and Disney recognised the strategic value of the IPL content. The merger was to rationalise the fact that you’re going to have two bidders who see the strategic value of that content. They could fight each other and monetise it separately in a market that was becoming tougher,” a senior industry leader explains. “By doing so, they were cannibalising one another’s distribution strength. Therefore, it made sense to consolidate and bring a business together so that it could be monetised efficiently.”

Shankar is happy with the way the merger has progressed. His favourite anecdote from the merger is what he calls the seamless integration of Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema. The mindset and working style as well as the content and technology of the two entities were different. Shankar’s diktat to his team was that differences needed to be blurred and the union had to be made seamless. “I told the team that viewers must not be inconvenienced. The corporate agenda must not impact the consumer agenda, as the customers did not ask us to merge. We need to enhance customer experience, rather than causing inconvenience.”

Both Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema had their own subscribers and subscription plans. The dilemma was whether to take a calibrated approach to the merger or launch the combined entity at one go. The latter obviously was a nightmare. Combining databases of two large entities was not easy. But taking dangerous leaps into the unknown is where Shankar thrives. The merger was announced in November 2024; on February 14, 2025, JioHotstar was launched as a combined entity.

“It was a monstrous effort. It was literally at the stroke of midnight when everything was moved to one database. Consumers couldn’t be told that if they had a JioCinema or Disney+ Hotstar subscription, the rules are different. The rules have to be one, and it was our problem: how do we manage traffic behind the scenes,” he says. Shankar is quick to credit his team. “If somebody had asked me to dream of seamlessness, even I could not have come up with this. It was totally outstanding on the part of the team. But it required huge amounts of planning.”

A year-and-a-half later, JioHotstar boasts of a subscriber base of 500 million, including 300 million paid users (it was 50 million at the time of merger). IPL, JioHotstar’s most prestigious property, got 1.2 billion viewers across screens (streaming, linear and CTV) this year; 260 million were paid subscribers. When the merger happened, the combined entity reported a loss of ₹12,548 crore. In FY26, the company reported a net profit of ₹3,145 crore and revenue of ₹31,666 crore.

In comparison, ZEE Entertainment reported revenues of ₹8,294 crore in FY26. Its streaming platform, ZEE5, after the FIFA World Cup, has a paid subscriber base of 4-5 million. Sony Pictures Networks reported revenue of ₹7,046 crore in FY26. Its OTT platform, Sony LIV, as per publicly available data, has around 26-30 million paid subscribers. Pure-play streaming platform Netflix India clocked revenue of ₹3,769 crore, with a subscriber base of 20-22 million in 2025, according to the latest available figures.

COMMERCE BET

During the early years at Star India, Shankar’s constant crib was the industry’s inability to monetise subscription revenue due to opaque regulations. He played a pivotal role in bringing in transparency to the distribution business, which enabled the media industry to significantly reduce its dependence on advertising. But Shankar 2.0 stresses the need for newer revenue streams. According to him, advertising and subscriptions are passé. “Everybody else has come and attacked our revenue streams. Advertising was once the preserve of media companies,” he says. That has changed now. “Now everybody is doing advertising. E-commerce and delivery services are doing advertising. Our pool of income or revenue has been hit, but we haven’t created anything new. The most disruptive media companies, even in streaming, are still limited to these two things — give me an ad or buy a subscription. That is not sustainable.”

Former Star India CEO Sameer Nair finds Shankar’s view thought-provoking. “Market leaders should be the ones who set the pace, define scale, and substance for the industry, that makes everyone else follow suit. With a paid subscriber base of 300 million and favourable tailwinds, JioStar is in a position to recreate entertainment while setting taste and cultural context for a global-facing 21st century nation,” says Nair, who stepped down as the MD of Applause Entertainment in April.

As for Shankar, he believes tech-led commerce is the future, even in media. That explains the Swiggy experiment that JioHotstar pulled during the IPL this year. A feature enabled consumers to order food on Swiggy within the JioHotstar app. Swiggy paid JioHotstar for the new consumers it acquired and also bought advertising. The deal happened with one realisation: the business of entertainment is now a multi-platform phenomenon. Consumers may watch an IPL match on their connected TV, but they invariably browse their smartphones.

“If people are multitasking, we want to figure out what the things are that sit around the cricket viewing experience that we can bring into the app so that multitasking can happen within the app and drive greater engagement. Most people like to order food while watching a match, and IPL games are usually between 7-10 p.m. From our discussions with Swiggy, we got to know that’s when food orders spike. So, we integrated with them directly,” explains Ishan Chatterjee, CEO (sports), JioStar. That association led to 69 million customers experiencing Swiggy via the JioHotstar app; 30% of these customers were first-time Swiggy users. Shankar calls the Swiggy deal a successful ‘experiment’. “It is early days of content commerce, but I definitely see it emerging as a promising monetising engine.”

The Swiggy partnership, says Chatterjee, has proved that the top funnel of consumers who visit JioHotstar to watch a match could also be converted into transacting consumers. “We could do that for multiple categories and multiple content areas as long as we get the connection right and it makes sense to a consumer. Nobody is going to come to JioHotstar just to shop. But if there is food delivery when you are watching a match, it sort of makes sense,” Chatterjee explains. JioStar had also experimented with the same idea on MTV Splitsvilla (a reality show). It had partnered with apparel brand Newme for ‘Shop the Look’, enabling viewers to buy the outfits worn by the contestants by tapping on the shop icon.

So, is JioStar trying to replicate Amazon’s content commerce strategy? The e-commerce giant has a vibrant cross-commerce play globally across its various platforms. Not only can Amazon shoppers (outside India) upload a picture and get a recommendation of what would look good on them and buy from brands listed on the platform, but even Prime Video enables them to shop the look of characters of their shows.

According to former India TV CEO Paritosh Joshi, JioHotstar can afford to invest in content commerce, something that Amazon India can’t just yet because it is a wholesaler and the laws do not allow it to do so. “The implications of what they could potentially do with serving content is actually exactly like Amazon, which is, can I cross-refer between what’s happening on content consumption and what is happening on product consumption? Can I somehow juxtapose or consolidate and start to begin to harvest this opportunity?”

Meanwhile, Gaurav Mehta, MD of advisory firm 45North, explains why it is imperative to look at revenue streams beyond advertising and subscription. “The ad market in India has had its challenges, and media companies will need to build monetisation streams beyond ads and traditional subscription models,” he explains.

An otherwise lacklustre advertising market (with sectors such as edtech and online gaming stepping out of the advertising arena and traditional sectors such as FMCG becoming risk-averse) has become further dull since the outbreak of the West Asia war. Most listed media companies have reported a 6–7% dip in ad revenue. ZEE Entertainment in Q1FY27 has reported a 48% dip in profits due to the impact on advertising revenue because of the war. IPL has managed to earn around ₹4,500-5,000 crore ad revenue this season. While it is certainly an achievement in a difficult market, it is way below the required ₹8,500 crore ad revenue per year to stay profitable. The nationwide ban on gaming has wiped out ₹1,500-2,000 crore of sponsorship revenue of broadcasters across the board. With advertising becoming increasingly undependable, it is not surprising that Shankar is determined to look at newer monetisation engines. “So going forward, they [media companies] will need another revenue driver. Maybe the transactional path or commerce is something that they need to bring in,” Mehta says.

TECH STACK

But why does Shankar still call JioStar a technology platform? The answer circles back to the multitasking consumer who no longer watches on a single screen. If someone is watching content on his/her phone and eventually connects the phone to the TV, it becomes family viewing. Shankar wants to offer content that is unique for mobile phone consumers as well as connected TV consumers, and that needs technology. With attention spans being low, one seldom watches a show or a match continuously. He/she browses on the phone while watching something. And that’s where content commerce (the Swiggy or Newme experience) plays a critical role.

“People often want to experience the same content on different mediums and in different formats. The technology stack has the ability to look at consumers, examine what they need and how to serve them. The same applies to advertisers too. I will not pretend that we have full clarity, but we are on a very active journey of exploration,” says Shankar, who is obsessed with delivering his content to consumers in multiple formats.

Kevin Vaz, CEO (Entertainment), JioStar, offers a more nuanced view. He says ratings no longer determine success. It depends on how many consumers they have reached out to across screens. Content needs to be screen-agnostic. He cites the example of Bigg Boss, which has been a popular reality show on linear television for years. “For the on-the-go mobile audience, we have a 24-hour service. There is a live camera installed in the Bigg Boss house. People can come at any point of the day and see what’s happening in the house. We also have gaming, Jeeto Dana Dan. As they are watching the show, they will be voting. Therefore, the level of interactivity has changed,” he explains.

Vaz cites the example of Splitsvilla which was always called a niche. “These days, shows such as Roadies and Splitsvilla are not niche. Splitsvilla gets something like 200 million watch time.”

Shankar credits technology for these numbers. He rubbishes critics’ view of JioHotstar not having enough original content and being too dependent on sports. “The trade creates all these phoney categories for its own satisfaction, and I have no faith in any of that. If you’re a streaming-only platform, you have to produce a lot more content because you don’t have content,” he reasons. “For us, we have so much content coming from our partners in Hollywood. We have so much content coming from our own TV production. And we have so much live sports. All of that is original. We don’t take somebody else’s content and run it.” The one big difference between JioHotstar versus the rest is their depth of content. Apart from having the rights to most of the major sporting properties, it also has content from global content companies (Paramount, Peacock, HBO, etc.) on its platform.

But isn’t it over-dependent on sports for its existence? Shankar doesn’t think that’s a problem. “I don’t want to reduce my dependence on sports. Why would I want to? If consumers like sports and if we know how to create a superior experience using sports and get better traffic, we don’t want to reduce our dependence. We do want business realities and costs to be aligned. But I don’t see a world where we would not be dependent on sports.”

In fact, with the Reliance-Disney-Star-merger, the IPL rights value is expected to flatten in the 2028-2032 cycle. “Reliance and Uday have ensured that nobody enters the bidding arena. They have taken the value to such a level that nobody would dare to bid,” says a senior industry leader. Even Netflix, which streams NFL games globally, feels it is high-ticket. In an interview earlier this year, when Fortune India had asked Netflix’s chief content officer Bela Bajaria if the streaming platform was interested in bidding for IPL rights, she exclaimed, “Do you know how expensive it is?”

Critics say that for a platform that has spent close to ₹50,000 crore just on IPL rights, investing in original content or films can’t be a priority. “Nobody produces as much content as we do,” argues Vaz. “We make it in more languages. We might not make as many Hindi shows, or we may not participate in movies as much, and that’s a choice we have made,” he adds. “We are very clear that when we enter a space, we would like to own that space. And that becomes a moat. When we entered English, we said we want every Hollywood studio on our platform.” Moreover, Shankar has committed to spending ₹35,000 crore on original content every year. And that includes sports as well.

Vaz cites numbers to contradict criticism that JioHotstar does not have enough content to hold consumer attention after IPL or ICC tournaments. “In the April-May-June quarter, we have the biggest tournament. We have 450 million monthly active users. However, in the July-September quarter also, I engage with 450 or 500 million monthly active users. We have seen continuous growth. Every tournament has got more and more people to come and sample us.”

Shankar is especially proud of the micro-drama platform, Tadka (christened by Nita Ambani), that already boasts of a subscriber base of 200 million in less than a year of launch. “How many platforms have you seen where they have both long-form horizontal and vertical formats sitting on the same app (between JioHotstar and Tadka), and operating seamlessly?” he asks. “The opportunities and the scope that Tadka creates to engage with consumers in a very different way across the spectrum, be it viewers or with advertisers, I see huge possibilities there.”

Meanwhile, the media company has partnered with OpenAI to enhance the platform’s search experience. The idea was to go beyond the usual search-discovery experience. The partnership enables viewers to get interesting details about shows, statistics about various sports, and sports personalities.

During IPL, for instance, if a cricketer, say Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, was at the crease, viewers were able to ask the OpenAI-powered search engine how much he had scored in the previous match, details about his debut match, and so on. Moreover, they could ask their questions in their preferred language. “It deepened engagement with the audience,” says Chatterjee. “OpenAI is also thrilled with the volume of traffic that has been coming its way. We are just scratching the surface here. In the future, as you start to have agents, that could become a very interesting second-screen experience. You are watching the game and also talking to your phone,” he adds.

All this is to say that Shankar’s vision for the future is clear: “I would see us pivoting to a technology-first company way more than where we are at present. I want to dramatically disrupt the revenue and monetisation models in a very big way with newer innovations.” What frightens him the most is the limitation of the advertising and subscription model. “I also want to make sure that we get more and more share of consumers’ time not just for appointment viewing, but generally for the whole day, while reducing the unit costs of content.”

His ambitions aren’t limited to the Indian audience. JioHotstar has announced its launch in the U.K., Canada, and Singapore. But India, Shankar says, has enough value which needs to be unlocked first. His mindset of challenging the status quo fits in well with Reliance’s way of doing business, which is all about capturing the market. Their 300 million paid subscriber base does give them the might, but senior industry observers feel that having control over hardware is easier; along with it, JioStar is also selling software, which is content. The challenge for JioStar would be to strike the right balance. But for now, one thing is clear: Shankar’s appetite for disruption remains undiminished, even after two decades.