JioHotstar, India’s largest streaming platform, has increased its paying subscriber base to over 200 million, driven by multi-language live broadcasts of the hugely popular Indian Premier League cricket matches, a senior executive said.
“That makes us one of the biggest streaming services anywhere in the world,” said Uday Shankar, vice chairman of JioStar, the joint venture between Reliance Industries and Walt Disney, which runs the JioHotstar platform.
To get so many paying subscribers just from India in such a short time was “pretty satisfying,” he said on Friday.
The milestone makes JioHotstar the third-largest video streaming service globally by user count, trailing only Netflix and Amazon.com’s Prime Video. All three are locked in a battle for supremacy in India’s fast growing but fiercely competitive streaming market.
While JioStar is aggressively wooing users with low fees and live sports streaming, Netflix is ramping up original local content and Prime Video has tied up with Apple TV+ and Crunchyroll to attract viewers.
Shankar, who played a key role in stitching the Disney-Reliance media merger, said the broader ambition is to get every potential customer in the country onto his platform.
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