India’s JioStar has achieved what few streaming platforms have managed globally, doubling its subscriber base to 100 million just six weeks after launch.
The milestone represents an extraordinary achievement for the platform, which emerged from the $8.5 billion merger of India’s Reliance Industries and Disney‘s Indian media assets. The deal combined Disney’s Star India with Reliance’s Viacom18 and streaming platforms JioCinema and Hotstar. At the time of launch, JioHotstar had approximately 45 million subscribers, with both platforms collectively delivering about 180-200 million monthly active users.
Now, Kiran Mani, CEO — Digital of parent company JioStar, has revealed the strategy behind the streaming platform’s meteoric rise to over 100 million subscribers.
“In that sheer short span of time, in six weeks, our subscription base was at about 45 to 50 million subs. And in just six weeks, I would say that we are well north of the triple digit number,” Mani tells Variety. “Even though we’re putting 100 million, I think it’s well past the 100 million mark too.”
Mani attributes the platform’s rapid growth to three fundamental principles: access, loyalty-building and value-focused pricing.
“We put in a lot of thought and action into being present in a billion screens across mobile manufacturers, CTVs [connected TVs], and ensuring that we were a default app present was important,” Mani explains. JioHotstar has partnered with more than 40 CTV manufacturers and 70+ mobile phone providers, and currently has close to 55-60 million active CTV screens.
The second strategic element involved allowing potential subscribers to sample the platform’s vast content library before making a commitment. “We want to basically have people come and experience the entire library for a large enough sampling period,” Mani says. “In hindsight, that was a completely new proposition taken by any OTT [streamer], but very glad that we took the decision.”
Perhaps most significantly, in a very price conscious market, the platform maintained its affordable pricing strategy despite the temptation to raise rates after combining two major content libraries. At approximately INR49 (about $0.57) per month, JioStar has positioned itself as an essential service rather than a luxury.
“I think in India, you have to be careful that you have to offer value before you scale it,” Mani observes. “People now in India, at least for JioHotstar, have made entertainment a part of their basic necessity pack. So rather than a want, it has become a need.”
“We never forget the fact that loyalty leads to subscription, not subscriptions lead to loyalty,” Mani adds. “So we build access, we build loyalty and then provide subscriptions, and always maintain subscriptions at a level where people feel this is good value that they are getting, because India is very much a value centric market and we have to adhere to that.”
The platform’s sports offerings, particularly the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament, have been a significant driver of viewership. The recent Champions Trophy hit a global record for concurrency for any sporting event, and Mani notes that even regular matches are now breaking records previously set by major finals.
Beyond sports, JioStar is pioneering new content formats through its “Sparks” initiative — where India’s top 25 creators come to the platform and build their own IPs — and includes live streaming events like a recent Coldplay concert and religious ceremonies such as Mahashivaratri, when broadcasts from 12 temples across India drew viewers from 6 p.m. until past 8:30 a.m. the following day.
The platform is also exploring vertical micro dramas — short-form episodic content designed for mobile viewing, a format that’s generating billions in revenue across Asia. “It’s a super interesting format, and I’m very confident that it will bring in an entirely new set of producers and storytellers to life,” Mani says.
JioStar’s content strategy extends to Hollywood offerings as well, where the platform has discovered that making international content available in multiple Indian languages dramatically increases viewership. “One of the things that we’ve seen as a trend is the content ‘travelability’ across multiple language boundaries in India,” Mani notes, adding that Hollywood content is most frequently consumed in Hindi rather than English.
The platform has also revolutionized its approach to telco partnerships, automatically activating subscriptions based on users’ existing telco packages rather than forcing them to navigate multiple subscription paths. “This, I think, is the first time it has ever happened with all the telcos in India, and that has also meant that the uplift that we are seeing and the attached rates that we are seeing with telcos are never seen before,” Mani says.
Looking ahead, JioStar is investing heavily in personalization powered by AI. “Today, when I open the app, or when my wife opens the app, or my daughter opens the app, the version of the app that they see is fundamentally different,” Mani explains. “The ability to personalize to the order of one has really happened at the fastest possible time.”
The platform is also enhancing interactivity, particularly for sports viewing, with features like “key moments” that allow viewers to access short-form highlights while watching long-form content. Advanced metadata tagging — cricket balls are tagged with 90 different parameters — enables sophisticated voice search and personalized clip compilations.
When asked about a timeline for reaching 200 million subscribers, Mani declined to set a specific target. “We never even anticipated that the timeline for the 100 million is going to be so soon, who knows?” he says. “I think India surprises us. We’re very grateful. I also feel it’s a position of responsibility now, because we’ve gotten to a place where no one has gone before, which also means that every rule book is is getting redefined. So if we get 200 million, we’ll be very, very grateful, but it makes our responsibility even more.”
