JioStar's subscriber base surges 6x since February amid race with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video

Reliance Industries -owned JioHotstar’s subscription base has surged six-fold in less than five months, crossing a staggering 300 million subscribers, the company revealed in its latest report. Titled ‘TATA IPL 2025: A Year of Firsts’, the report highlights that the 18th edition of the Indian Premier League delivered a record-breaking combined reach of 1.19 billion viewers across TV and digital platforms, with 537 million tuning in via television and 652 million streaming digitally. The TATA IPL 2025 on the JioStar network marked the highest reach ever recorded for the tournament.

The average daily reach for the last two months stood at 291 million viewers, both digital and TV combined, which is twice the viewership reach of the USA’s Super Bowl.

Speaking at the APOS Summit in Bali on June 25, 2025, Sanjog Gupta, CEO – Sports & Live Experiences at JioStar, attributed the platform’s record-breaking success to sustained and significant investments in growing the sports entertainment category.

“While numbers around acquisition prices for sports rights tend to be thrown around a lot, what at times gets missed is the sheer investment that a network such as ours has made to grow those properties by way of marketing, by way of production, by way of investment in technology and that over the last decade and a half exceeds 500 million dollars. That is outside of what we paid for the acquisition of rights,” Gupta said.

In June 2022, the BCCI had sold the IPL broadcasting rights for an unprecedented ₹48,390 crore for the 2023–27 cycle.

Another key factor behind JioStar’s ability to attract new viewers during this IPL season was the sharp rise in vernacular viewership. The platform saw significant year-on-year growth across regional language feeds, with Telugu seeing the highest rise by 87%, followed by Kannada (65%), Tamil (52%), Bengali (34%), and Haryanvi (47%). The viewership growth in these languages surpasses percentage growth figures in Hindi. This strong regional traction highlights the platform’s success in localising content to drive deeper engagement across diverse audiences.

In comparison to its global and domestic peers, JioStar has emerged as a front-runner in India’s OTT race. Amazon Prime Video had over 200 million subscribers globally as of 2024, according to CEO Andy Jassy’s shareholder letter, with India accounting for less than 10% of that total, as per media reports. Netflix, meanwhile, has over 301.6 million subscribers worldwide as of 2025.

Indian platforms like Zee5 and SonyLiv continue to trail significantly behind JioStar in subscriber count.

What sets JioStar apart is not just its scale but also its affordability; it remains the least expensive among global streaming platforms. While Netflix’s premium annual plan costs ₹7,788 and Amazon’s ad-free Prime Video membership recently rose to ₹2,198 per year, JioStar offers its annual subscription at just ₹1,499.

Beyond competitive pricing, JioStar’s aggressive push into sports entertainment, especially cricket, and a robust, diverse content library have played a pivotal role in expanding its subscriber base across the country.

As a result, the IPL continues to rank among the world’s most heavily advertised sporting leagues. The 2025 season on JioStar featured over 425 brands, including more than 270 first-time advertisers, spanning across 40 distinct categories.

“This IPL, not only have we reached a billion viewers across platforms, we have also managed to make this IPL the most monetised edition of the event and also the most monetised sporting event ever in India across advertising and subscription revenue,” Gupta added during the summit.