Swiggy to NEWME, Samsung and Open AI, JioStar is betting heavily on content commerce

JioHotstar’s partnership with Swiggy during IPL this year resulted in 69 million consumers ordering food through Swiggy on the JioHotstar platform. It was a win-win for both JioHotstar and Swiggy. Over 30% of consumers who ordered food on Swiggy, were first-time users. The food delivery platform paid JioHotstar for new consumer acquisitions as well as bought advertising.

“What I am most proud about is the technical integration. Both of us invested heavily. We invested in product and engineering resource to make sure the experience was seamless. Harbajan Singh did a promo to explain to users how to find the Swiggy integration within the IPL experience. It was a joint effort by both teams,” explains Ishan Chatterjee, CEO (sports), JioStar. While the Swiggy association is something that the media conglomerate has done at scale, JioHotstar in the past year has been quietly experimenting with content commerce as an engine of monetisation.

Prior to the Swiggy deal, the media conglomerate had partnered with apparel brand, NEWME for MTV Splitsvilla, which enabled consumers to ‘shop the look’ of the contestants while they were watching the show. It also partnered with Samsung during the release of Dhurandhar – The Revenge, for Samsung S26 handsets. Consumers who watched the film on JioHotstar were given a special offer. “It is still early days, but I am quite sure the future would be all about watching content and shopping simultaneously. I think it could be a big revenue opportunity,” says Kevin Vaz, CEO (entertainment), JioStar.

Chatterjee also considers content commerce a great opportunity for challenger brands to reach out to their target audiences. “If you are a new D2C brand and looking for a cool way to get to a huge audience base, you could partner with us.”

“We will of course be very deliberate about which categories and which content areas we would want to have tie-ups with brands. But over a period of time, we will build this out,” he further adds.

During the IPL, JioStar partnered with Open AI for its voice search functionality. Consumers could ask about a player’s performance in the earlier match or his IPL track record and the Open AI search engine would give them all the details. “Earlier our search experience was like any other OTT platform. We realised it would be cool if we had a voice-based functionality that would allow you to engage with the content in a way that went far beyond just the normal searching-discovery experience. The adoption that we saw across the board was fantastic. Open AI was thrilled with the volume of traffic that was coming their way,” says Chatterjee. He believes that the Open AI partnership is merely scratching the surface of a huge opportunity.

“So far, we have only spoken of it in voice terms, but in future, as you start to have agents, it could become a very interesting second screen experience. You can actually talk to your phone while watching a match. For instance, if Bumra or any other player plays in a particular way in a particular over, you could chat with your phone as to what the eventual outcome of the match could be. We are already trying to build such engagements. If that happens, it will surely open up monetisation opportunities for us.”

But how does one monetise these engagements? “It's a pretty standard monetisation approach that we have, based on the amount of traffic that we would send out of the platform, you would pay a certain cost per user. But what is most interesting is that it allows us to do lot of innovative integrations,” explains Chatterjee.

A chat with the AI agent on Vaibhav Suryavanshi’s strike rate for instance, could probably lead a consumer at some point to buy his jersey too. JioStar vice-chairman, Uday Shankar, in a recent interview with Fortune India, had said advertising revenue has ceased to be the preserve of media companies. “Everybody else has come and attacked our streams of revenue. E-commerce companies are doing advertising, even delivery service companies. Our pool of income or revenue has been hit by everybody. 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.”

Is content commerce Shankar’s way of getting back at new-age businesses who he believes have encroached upon the media industry’s largest source of revenue? JioStar’s bet on content commerce is certainly worth a watch.