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5 days ago
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When Mumbai commercial powerhouse Reliance Industries and Disney India decided to team up and form India’s largest broadcasting, production and streaming business, it was clear the ambition was as big as the $8.5B pricetag slapped on the deal.
Reliance, owned by India’s most wealthy man, Mukesh Ambali, had control of channels biz Viacom18 plus ultra-popular low-cost streamer JioCinema and its sports content for a cricket-mad nation, while The Walt Disney Company’s Indian assets included Disney+ Hotstar, the leading streaming service in the country after its 2021 launch, and the Star India networks. When the Sony and Zee Entetainment Enterprises merger collapsed under the weight of regulatory scrutiny, the pathway became even clearer for the new kid on the block to assert dominance.
With a content library totalling more than 30,000 hours and estimated annual revenues of more than $3.1B, the newly named JioStar was set to get going, except for one big question: What the combined JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar service would look like. Today that question is answered.
The streamer will go by the name of JioHotstar, and claims to be able to offer a customer base of potentially 500 million users close to 300,000 hours of entertainment and live sports as part of an ‘infinite possibilities’ strategy.
The content will be offered in 19 languages in total, with its management team having spent months developing a system of targeting thousands of small pockets of customers through the likes of ultra-HD 4K streaming, AI-driven recommendations and personalization tools.
JioHotstar’s leaders say its slate is bigger and broader than any comparable service anywhere in the world. They may have a point: It comprises everything from ICC and IPL cricket, long-running Indian soaps, U.S. studio fare from the likes of Warner Bros Discovery/HBO, NBCUniversal, and Paramount, kids content from both India and the likes of Nickelodeon, and edgier premium drama series such as Criminal Justice, Aarya and Dahan. Furthermore, JioStar CEO of Entertainment Kevin Vaz estimates JioHotstar will make around “40 to 50” originals in languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Karnataka, sitting alongside myriad Hindi shows and films.
Live streaming will play a huge role. Following on from last month’s live stream of a Coldplay concert, Music of the Spheres, which was an unexpectedly big success gaining more than 8.3 million streamers on Disney+, JioHotstar is placing live events in JioStar Sports CEO Sanjog Gupta’s division — a show of faith that music can drive comparable subs numbers to cricket and soccer. This move will lead to various programs, along with key sports events, that provide ‘elevated streaming experiences’ — think AI-powered insights, real-time stats overlays, multi-angle viewing and a range of ‘culture’ and ‘special interest’ feeds.
On the cricket front, the ultra-popuar Indian Premier League (IPL), which is being reunited with Disney+ Hotstar after switching to JioCinema in 2022, will joined by international ICC tournaments, women’s league the WPL, the grassroots Indian Street Premier League (born out the tennis ball cricket played on roads across India), and pathway events from the BCCI, ICC and state associations. Domestic sports such as the Kabbadi Pro league will also sit alongside the English Premier League and the Wimbledon tennis grand slam in a sporting line-up certainly unmatched in India.
JioHotstar also today announced Sparks, a short-form initiative designed to spotlight India’s biggest digital creators through two-minute videos that tie to longer-form productions. New branding for JioHotstar, developed by Venturethree, has also been unveiled.
Of course, all of this comes at a big cost and JioHotstar will need to find its route to profitability pretty quickly. Those with existing JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar accounts will transfer over to the new service, where they will be offered subscription plans starting at ₹149 ($1.71) per month. “At the core of JioHotstar is a powerful vision — to make premium entertainment truly accessible to all Indians,” JioStar CEO of Digital Kiran Mani, said today.
Mani, Gupta and Vaz sat down with Deadline yesterday over Zoom to discuss the launch in-depth.
DEADLINE: Our market sources and consumers are keen to discover what the new service will look like, and what they can expect coming up. Can you describe plans for the first few months and, longer term, what role you want to play in the market?
Kiran Mani: Hopefully, consumers will see this as simply as two of India’s largest OTT premium entertainment apps coming together under one brand, JioHotstar. Our hope is it unfolds into something which is far bigger than that over a period of time.
A key bucket is access to premium entertainment. In our view, this is the first time that an Indian consumer will have true access to a really large portfolio of premium entertainment across a billion screens. Whether it is a linear TV, a connected TV, a mobile phone or even of even what we call a ‘feature phone,’ which is priced at Indian rupee ₹2,500 [$30], you can actually watch live streams and watch content on it. Two-inch to 200-inch screens will light up across India.
We’ve made a substantially different take than anyone else has ever done, anywhere in the world, in that we are opening up our entire library for people to sample. Most subscription brands actually make you first subscribe and then tell you what the experience is going to be.
Lastly, it’s really about making sure that this democratized way of looking at premium content also makes economic sense. How do you drive subscription models on it? How do you drive advertising models on it? How do you bring it all together so that we actually build a sustainable ecosystem?
DEADLINE: What do the two services bring from technological and content standpoints?
KM: I do feel that we were India’s number one and number two OTT platforms. Some users associated JioCinema as a sports enthusiast platform, Hotstar as the entertainment platform, but that was also largely due to the content IPs that both platforms brought in.
But Kevin and his team are actually bring to India the largest and the most deepened entertainment portfolio that India has ever seen. This isn’t restricted to a Hindi-speaking market or the southern India market or an eastern market. Now we have enough content to entertain people across a broad range of entertainment portfolio. I would actually look at this and sat that it’s not two apps coming together, but it’s about the world’s largest premium entertainment and sports library coming together and building new ways of viewing and experiences coming
DEADLINE: Kevin, what content will be people be able to access on day one, and what will you focus on adding going forwards?
Kevin Vaz: This will be the one stop shop for all this entertainment. As Kiran mentioned, the question is how do we light up a billion screens? We have the ambition to do it, and clearly that means that we need to talk to everyone in India. It also means that you need to talk to everyone in the family, and not be an app which is suited only to one member of the family and thus making only one kind of content.
For kids, this will be one of the most powerful offerings with Disney and Nickelodeon, and we’ve got some great local IPs, which we have created over the years. Next is for the youth segment, the 15- to 21-year-olds. We have the legacy of MTV as a brand [in India], which understands the youth the best. In this country, our proposition for that is going with a proposition of reality TV, always on. We have got some really big IPs, which we have created, such as Big Brother [aka Bigg Boss], Fear Factor and a lot of local IPs such as Splitsvilla, Roadies and Hustle. We also have one of the biggest talk shows in the country, Koffee with Karan.
We will have short series of six to eight episodes targeting young adults, approximately around two every month that people can binge. But what’s more important is since we are looking at reaching out to a large part of India, we will also look at doing some longer-form series in 60, 80 or 100 episodes. Lastly, for the slightly older folk, we’ll have 100 channels, which are from both companies. They play mainstream soaps, which play on TV across nine languages. We’ll have all of that coming on the JioHotstar platform before TV.
In total, that’s close to 30, 000 hours of content in a year, and the icing on the cake is content for the premium audience. We’ll have one of the best services in the world for the premium audience, and this is the first time that you would get to see all the biggest Hollywood studios on a single platform. I don’t think so that exists anywhere else.
DEADLINE: The sports package looks really comprehensive, with almost all cricket tournaments of note and other events. How will you make sure you consolidate that initial position of power?
Sanjog Gupta: We want to be more inclusive than any other service around the world, which is why every major cricket match that we stream is actually not a live stream, but a ‘mega stream’ with 12 to 15 parallel, fully-customized, curated feeds serving audiences in different geographies.
While sport largely tends has been a lean-back experience, we want to deliver a compelling lean-in experience. An example of that is the ‘watch and play’ feature that we’ve built where there is a functionality where you play along with the live game on your handset. We will allow users to, to choose the hero that they want to watch, so you could potentially watch an entire cricket match focusing with the focus on Jos Butler or on Virat Kohli, and actually toggle between them at different points in the game.
The final part here is is to make the service as intuitive as possible. Kiran and my team worked on how to drive consumption or viewership for audiences when they’re on the move on a six-inch screen, and whether should that experience be the same as the experience on a 60-inch screen when they’re at home on their couches. We developed what is now called MaxView, which is a virtual viewing experience, largely catering to those who are on the move. We’re saying let’s understand sports fans the best. Let’s segment them by their behavior, demographics, geographies, and in-built fan cohorts and serve them a best in class, next-gen sports experience.
DEADLINE: Several producers and agents I’ve spoken to recently in India say the buyers’ market has shrunk from around ten active parties to about three, now JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar have merged. The high-end, premium content commissions have dropped and there’s a desire for more traditional crime or romantic stories. With so many producers and so few buyers, what is your message to the production community?
KV: The one thing for us is, we’d be looking at content that is family-inclusive. The market has been heavily into edgy content targeting one member of the family, but we’ll need to try and see how we can get more inclusive content because clearly if you have an ambition of wanting to light up a billion screens, you need to talk to a much larger audience. You need to talk to more members in the house.
KM: The way we see it, there are three large pools of content consumption in India: Habit-based consumption, which is largely shaped from a television audience and people who like to watch their particular long form series. YouTube is essentially hub-based consumption, where 90% happens across 24 behavioral hubs such as music or DIY. OTTs, on the other hand, have been very much based on hero content, which is movies, short series, et cetera. In our case, we can’t stand for just one content hub.
KV: For the last few years, there has been the meme that India is all about the most expensive eight-episode shows that gets in and that gets all the attention. The reality is that’s a, that’s a four-city market. It’s not a billion-person market, no matter how much Netflix, Amazon Prime and others have played in it. It’s not a market that grows. Now, will we cater to that? Yes. But are we only going to cater to that? No.
If anything, it’s a world of focus that we now can basically serve audiences anywhere in India through any form. Hence every content creator should feel excited about the fact that their content has a eyeball that we can reach.
DEADLINE: Everything you’re talking about here is hugely ambitious, and that means there is a huge cost attached to it. While you’ve got the financial clout of Reliance and Disney, the issue with streaming over the last few years has been making the economic work. So what’s the state of play here? Are you profitable on day one or when exactly do you expect profitability?
KV: No, we are not profitable on day one, but there are three angles to look at here. Currently, the content industry is drunk on a venture capitalist approach, which is, ‘I will cash in on my idea as quickly as possible,’ but it’s not a stock market approach of sustainable delivery. That has to change. Our responsibility is, as the eyeballs grow, we make very sustainable business models. One of the calls that we have taken is our content is always going to be subscriptions-plus-advertising.
Another thing we are very conscious on the costing model is that we don’t want to take a supplier approach to pricing: ‘Oh, we have such a ton of content and we have paid so much of money. Hence, you should pay me ‘X’.’ If we can find the right value context, then we have economies of scale. It’s also extremely important that we don’t stick to one model. You have to make this break this down to micro businesses.
DEADLINE: Broadly, what’s your biggest challenge in the Indian market?
KM: This is an industry in which reputation size means nothing. Resonance, relevance and making sure that we are part of everyday life means everything. We don’t take that lightly. At our scale, we can’t afford to fail, and I think it’s a fact to say that. We just have to make sure that, in spite of whatever we are, we have an an ear to the ground.
KV: We know this is a big sporting country, big on cricket. We’ve got all the cricket with us, but can we transfer these audiences to come and watch entertainment on a daily basis?
SG: Our ambition is to be one of the world’s largest entertainment and experience services, and a big part of that rests on our ability to serve uniquely personalized experiences.
DEADLINE: You’ve talked about wanting to be one of the largest services “in the world” several times in recent days. Does that mean being a beacon for Indian streaming or do you see JioHotstar as something you can take to the Indian diaspora around the world?
KM: We absolutely believe that we have the content that can enthral the world. If K-pop can travel and if Hollywood content can be global, why not Indian content? Another thing Kevin’s team has done brilliantly is they have taken content from various parts of India and has made it travel across markets. The small state Kerala speaks a language called Malayalam, but the creative output from there is so high that movies and short series produced from there have the highest viewership in the Hindi belt, followed by Tamil.
We’ve all spoken about the context of what happens when you have globally-present content, which is locally relevant. There’s no reason why we can’t expand to Spanish or Portuguese, or expand to other parts of the world where we could resonate well. We absolutely have global ambitions.
