JioStar vice-chair Uday Shankar on surge in streaming subs, trade tariff challenges

JioStar Vice Chairman, Uday Shankar, says the group’s streaming platform JioHotstar has reached 200 million paying subscribers in India just months after its launch, a Bloomberg interview has stated.

He also told Bloomberg how they’re preparing for potential disruptions due to rising trade risks during an exclusive interview on Bloomberg’s ‘Insight with Haslinda Amin’ earlier this week. (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-04-11/jiostar-hits-200-million-paying-subscribers-in-india-video?srnd=phx-technology)

The surge in JioHostar’s paying subscribers, according to Shankar, was largely driven by the multi-language coverage of IPL 2025 cricket matches. Media reports have indicated that JioStar is airing IPL 2025 in 12 different languages, which include English, Hindi, Marathi, Haryanvi, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati and Punjabi.

“That makes us one of the biggest streaming services anywhere in the world,” Shankar, Vice Chairman of JioStar told Bloomberg. Jio Star was formed recently after Reliance Industries bought out most of Disney’s India operations with investments also from Bodhi Tree that’s a company formed by James Murdoch and former Disney Asia head Shankar.

A report in Business Standard newspaper yesterday, quoted Shankar telling Bloomberg that reaching 200 million paid users, largely from India, in such a short span was “pretty satisfying” as the streaming platform only trails global giants like Netflix and Amazon prime Video. (https://www.business-standard.com/companies/news/jiohotstar-crosses-200-million-subscribers-ipl-boost-global-ranking-125041100788_1.html)

“Our ambition is to get every potential customer in the country onto our platform,” Shankar said, emphasising on JioStar’s aggressive push to expand both reach and content offerings.

(Image is a screen grab from the Bloomberg interview)

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Amazing and grim battle for survival. Guess it will end up in Supreme Court. All that NCLT asked Zee to do was to file a reply to Invesco petition for a EGM. Now this is getting too serious. So far Invesco has been hammered for demanding an EGM. What is Zee upto? Ofcourse my lawyer community knows better!