JioStar, country’s largest entertainment company, is looking to invest Rs 33,000 crore in content development, encompassing sports and entertainment in FY26, vice-chairman Uday Shankar said on Saturday, as the firm seeks to build on its Pay TV and streaming strengths.
Speaking at the Waves Summit in Mumbai, Shankar said that the investment comes on the back of a Rs 30,000-crore content push in the current financial year and Rs 25,000 crore investment in FY24.
“The total investment will cross $10 billion (Rs 86,000 crore) in three years,” he said, adding that the investment was targeted at the domestic market only.
“When global companies announce content spends, they are aimed at international audiences. Our investments are made for Indian viewers, and are recovered from them. It is a different value cycle.”
Shankar also challenged the prevailing narrative that Pay TV was on the decline within the domestic media market. “India continues to be an exciting Pay TV market and will continue to be so for a while. We just stopped nurturing it. If you starve a healthy child, it will fall sick,” he said.
Noting that since the JioStar merger, Pay TV has added subscribers for the first time in years after the network decided to take the Indian Premier League (IPL) behind a hybrid paywall, Shankar said that media companies needed to be price sensitive and innovative.
“More households are subscribing to cable and satellite. It is a reminder that affordability and local relevance still matter. This will always be a price-sensitive market, and we must respect that.”
On streaming, JioStar’s digital platform JioHostar has already crossed 200 million paid subscribers, emerging the third-largest video-on-demand service globally, after Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
“If your ambition is to take it to 300 million or half a billion people, then you have to keep their affordability front and centre in your strategy,” he said.
Shankar also urged media companies to focus on monetisation.
“There has been zero innovation in monetisation. For 70 years, it has been the same formula—advertising and subscription. Today, that model is under attack from e-commerce platforms, tech giants, short video apps, and yet, we haven’t found anything new.”
Shankar said that companies would need to “innovate both content and product” and then find ways to make money. That’s when the market and shareholders would begin to value firms, he said.