Reliance scales AI, streaming and commerce as JioStar posts ₹34,917 crore revenue in FY26
ADVERTISEMENT
Reliance Industries’ media and entertainment business delivered a strong FY26 performance, with JioStar, Jio Studios and Network18 together reporting revenue of ₹34,917 crore, EBITDA of ₹5,842 crore and net profit of ₹3,434 crore, marking the first full year of integrated operations for the group’s media ecosystem.
Speaking at Reliance Industries’ 49th Annual General Meeting (AGM), Akash Ambani, chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited and managing director of Jio Platforms Limited, positioned the business as India’s most powerful media platform spanning television, digital streaming, content production and news.
JioStar maintained its leadership in television entertainment with a 34.7% viewership share—nearly matching the combined reach of the next three players. The network reached 389 million viewers daily across genres and languages.
On digital, JioHotstar continued its aggressive scale-up, averaging 451 million monthly active users during FY26 and emerging among the world’s largest streaming platforms. The company said the platform crossed one billion downloads, becoming the first Indian paid OTT platform to achieve the milestone and extending availability across 99% of connected TVs in the country.
“Our live streaming capabilities continue to set global benchmarks,” Ambani said, highlighting that JioHotstar recorded a world-record 72.5 million concurrent viewers in India during the T20 World Cup. IPL 2026 alone reached more than 700 million viewers on the platform.
What will power JioStar’s next phase of growth?
The company is now betting heavily on artificial intelligence and commerce-led engagement to shape the next phase of growth.
Among the key launches was AI Snapshot, a personalised recap engine that creates customised narratives for viewers, alongside conversational discovery powered by ChatGPT with Indian language and accent recognition capabilities. JioHotstar’s short-form content hub, Tadka, launched in April, has already crossed 100 million users in under two months.
Reliance also introduced what it called India’s first entertainment-led content commerce experience through in-stream shopping integrations and expanded interactive features including live chat, voting and meme creation. These features generated over 11 billion interactions from more than 100 million users.
Ambani also unveiled JioStar GenAI Media Studio (JAMS), an AI-native content production ecosystem. “Through JAMS, we aim to nurture a new generation of creative technologists who can combine storytelling with AI to produce premium-quality content for India and the world,” he said.
Beyond streaming, Jio Studios retained its leadership in film production, with the Dhurandhar franchise crossing ₹3,000 crore in worldwide box-office collections and becoming the first Indian film duology where each film individually crossed ₹1,000 crore, strengthening the studio’s position as India’s highest-grossing Hindi film studio for a third consecutive year.
Meanwhile, Network18 expanded its reach across television, digital and creator-led formats, reinforcing Reliance’s ambition to build a full-stack media and entertainment ecosystem.
With AI, commerce and content increasingly converging into a single consumer experience, Reliance is positioning JioStar not just as a media company but as a next-generation digital entertainment platform. The group’s FY26 performance signals its ambition to shape how India watches, interacts and transacts in the years ahead.