At the Asia Video Industry Association (AVIA) Future of Video India 2025, in partnership with World Audio Visual & Entertainment (WAVES) Summit, Sushant Sreeram, Chief Marketing Officer, JioStar engaged in an insightful conversation with Louis Boswell, CEO, AVIA on the topic ‘Forging a New Path to Inspire a Billion Imaginations’.
Louis kickstarted the conversation by taking a step back and asking Sushant on the year that has gone by. Sharing his experiences, Sushant said, “If I were to just consider the scale of what we have aspired to create and the ground that we have covered, it actually feels much longer than 7 months. It was in November 2024 that we brought together the businesses and the platforms and created JioStar. So it's very, very early days. It's almost like day zero of where we are. I am pretty excited.”
Louis stated JioStar is a major powerhouse in the Indian landscape. Taking the conversation ahead, he asked Sushant on what it takes to sell to 1.4 billion people, the challenges, and how he tackled his role as chief marketing officer? Sushant responded saying this was an opportunity to reset to understand what it means to be an entertainment destination for all India and streaming in particular.
He said, “We first need to aspire to be a brand for everybody. So our promise to our consumers is Infinite possibilities. We said, you don't need to make the choice. We will aspire and strive to serve you across everything that you see.” Further elaborating on the pace at which JioStar is connecting with India, he said, “We have more than 360 million people every day on the broadcast side. We had almost half a billion users on the digital platform in March 2024. The outcome of this is not so much an aspiration for scale, but more so an aspiration for
what we need to stand for when We are serving 800 million Indians and to go far to get into a billion screens. That will require us to reimagine every part of it - distribution, content, marketing, pricing, and subscriptions. These are early days, but We are very excited about what We are seeing.”
Steering the conversation towards the IPL, Louis delved into the importance of the IPL to which Sushant responded saying that the IPL has become the way of the world. JioStar has witnessed around 20% growth on television and a 40% growth in viewership on digital while the league is halfway through this season. Talking about the JioHostar’s offering beyond the IPL Sushant said “We now program across multiple languages and have immersive experiences with hero cams, multi-angle viewing and VR 360. We love live sports across. This ranges from The Champions Trophy which had a 61 million concurrency on JioHotstar which is four times the concurrency of the Super Bowl in the U.S. We have the Premier League, Wimbledon, El Clasico, Pro Kabaddi
among domestic leagues. There's other sports in addition to the programming from more than 100 network TV channels, which is part of the platform.”
Sushant stated that JioHotstar has the biggest international selection of Hollywood and international content in the country and is probably the only platform potentially in the world, that has all the major studios including Disney, Marvel, Warner Bros Discovery, HBO, Pixar, Paramount, NBCUniversal together on the same platform.
Speaking on live experiences, he added, “We were kind of making that leap with live experiences beyond sports. We live-streamed the Ahmedabad concert of Coldplay on the platform. Live experiences, whether it's sports or anything else, is essentially a shared communal experience with people.” He further added how they ventured into spiritual experiences with Mahashivratri, Ram Navami, which seen viewership even bigger than the Coldplay concert.
On IPL continuing to see such staggering growth despite being an 18-year-old property, Sushant pointed to the vast, untapped potential of India’s entertainment market. “We are largely yet to be a fully saturated country when it comes to entertainment… we have a long, long way ahead of us,” he said.
Rather than viewing paid, ad-supported, free-to-air, or premium in isolation, JioStar looks at the entire Indian opportunity holistically — and the numbers speak for themselves. “You're talking about a 50% growth year-onyear in connected TV consumption of IPL this year.” He emphasized that India’s journey as an entertainment powerhouse is well underway and poised to grow further — domestically and globally. He pointed to immersive experiences and expanded access through smarter distribution, pricing, and subscription models are growth drivers. “We crossed 100 million subscribers on JioHotstar in five weeks and a little under three months in, JioHotstar has about 280 million subscribers. Cumulatively, that platform is at about half a billion users”, he said.
Responding to Louis' question on how Sushant viewed the competitive landscape he offered a distinctly consumer-first lens — one that doesn’t chase time, but emotion. “We are not quoting attention. We are seeking to evoke emotions. Our currency is not time spent — it’s value delivered,” he said. Rather than focusing on rival platforms, he said the real competition lies in every “swipe, skip, scroll, and engagement” — across digital and broadcast ecosystems. He revealed that JioStar is “completely retooling personalisation” — because “no individual has the same persona through the day, or week, or month.”
He emphasised that while India remains the top priority, the roadmap doesn’t stop at its borders by saying “India is keeping us very busy right now… but we will get there. We are just getting started.
He stated that the value being built extends beyond just content. “We are building a technology platform that came together within months of the merger — that kind of scale, concurrency and immersive experience across live sports and entertainment — I believe that’s a global playbook in the making.”
Sushant also pointed to how the platform serves heterogeneous users without siloing into narrow target groups. “This approach to access, distribution, multi-language support and personalization — that’s another playbook,” he noted. And finally, on content: “India is already a storytelling powerhouse. This talk of a ‘coming of dawn’ — I disagree with. The dawn has arrived,” he said.
To Louis' question if global will follow domestic success, he responded, “If we can serve half a billion users consistently in India across product, technology, content, it’s a pretty good playbook to say, okay, what else can we do with this?”
“We truly believe that if you’re able to build that habit and loyalty at scale and consistently, the monetization will follow,” he stated. Importantly, he emphasized that Indian consumers have always had an appetite to pay for value. “We’ve used this opportunity of JioStar coming alive to truly unlock that,” Sushant said, adding, “We are resisting the temptation to be defined yet.”
Talking about the benefits that come along with subscription, Sushant said, “There’s a lot that you can deliver with subscriptions— multi-device access, 4K experience, downloads, etc. But we believe that we shouldn’t hold great storytelling and great entertainment behind a paywall alone and first seek a subscription to then say, ‘okay, now I have unlocked it for you.’ That doesn’t place consumer trust at the centre of it.”
According to Sushant, the platform’s subscription model is available for those who seek enhanced features or flexibility, but it’s not the default. “We have a very aggressive subscription proposition,” he noted, “but that’s not the starting point.”
On the critical issue of subscriber retention, Sushant emphasized that the key lies in consistently delivering value. “Retention is actually not a problem, provided we can consistently deliver value,” he said, underscoring the importance of moving away from a short-term, event-driven mindset. Rather than treating churn purely as a metric, Sushant sees it as valuable consumer feedback. “When they churn out, what they’re essentially saying is, ‘I didn’t see continued value in your service.’ The operative words there are ‘continued’ and ‘value,’” he noted.
He cited the launch of Sparks, the platform’s short-form content offering, as an early success. “If you’re able to build a brand, a destination that doesn’t force choice — whether in content formats or in how you balance free versus subscription — you build habit, and with habit comes everyday consumption,” Sushant said.
He described JioStar’s journey not as a typical business evolution, but as a “Big Bang” — a dramatic, foundational shift that has created an entirely new universe of possibilities. “We are not just building for India, we are building from India.” he concluded.
.jpg)
