Entertainment
India’s media colossus JioStar is doubling down on content investment, pouring approximately $3.6 billion into programming this year, with plans to increase spending further in 2026, according to vice chair Uday Shankar.
Speaking at Mumbai’s inaugural World Audio Visual Entertainment Summit (WAVES), Shankar revealed the company’s aggressive content strategy while highlighting the explosive growth potential of India’s media market.
“In 2024, the company spent [INR]25,000 crores [$3 billion] on content alone. In 2025, that number went to [INR]30,000 crores [$3.6 billion], and the number next year will be over [INR]32,000-35,000 crores [$3.8-4.1 billion],” Shankar told interviewer Vivek Couto of Media Partners Asia. “In three years, we have spent more than $10 billion.”
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Since the $8.5 million merger of Reliance’s Jio platforms with Disney’s Indian assets, JioStar has defied industry skeptics by growing both its traditional pay TV and streaming businesses. The company now boasts half a billion platform visitors, though Shankar declined to confirm specific subscriber numbers, which were last recorded at 200 million in April.
“The narrative was that pay TV is dead. The narrative was that the premium streaming space is a limited space of 15-20 million subscribers,” Shankar said. “Pay TV has added numbers, not lost numbers since we came together, because we are very focused.”
About the importance of affordability in the Indian market, Shankar stressed: “If you’re only selling to 15-20 million people, you can price it at whatever value you want. But if your ambition is to take it to 300 million or half a billion people, then you have to keep their affordability front and center in your strategy.”
He credited price sensitivity as a key driver of India’s media growth. “The entire explosive growth of cable and satellite television in this country has happened because the leaders of cable and satellite industry kept price sensitivity in the market. And we need to be price sensitive.”
Shankar criticized media companies globally for failing to innovate monetization models. “Seventy years ago, newspapers were taking advertising and charging subscription. Even today, the latest media company is still doing subscription and advertising,” he observed.
He predicted India’s $30 billion video entertainment market could double within five years if companies pursue deeper distribution and develop content tailored specifically for Indian audiences. “There is a need to go deeper and create new brands,” Shankar said, emphasizing opportunities in tier three and four cities.
The executive also addressed India’s theatrical market challenges, noting that while the Hindi-language Bollywood has struggled, southern Indian film industries continue to thrive – a divergence he attributed to content evolution failing to keep pace with changing audience preferences in the north.
Looking ahead, Shankar urged regulators to avoid homogenizing regulations across different platforms. “If the media companies have not innovated enough, the regulators are even further behind,” he remarked. “You keep hearing even now conversations about ‘all screens should be treated alike’… but you cannot do that. Then you will kill the value in both businesses.”
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Naman Ramachandran