In a new $ 8.5 million deal, Reliance Industries and Disney India have merged to create JioHotstar.
JioHotstar
According to Deadline, Mukesh Ambali, owner of Reliance Industries — which controls India’s popular low-cost streaming service JioCinema — has merged with The Walt Disney Company’s Disney+ Hotstar to form JioHotstar.
Disney+ Hotstar has been the leading streaming service in India since it launched in 2021. Recently the merger of Sony and Zee Entertainment collapsed due to regulatory scrutiny, making way for the new JioHotstar merger.
The JioHotstar content library will offer more than 300,000 hours of content including entertainment and live sports with a potential customer base of 500 million users.
The new streaming service’s content will be offered to users in 19 different languages. The leaders of JioHotstar say its slate is “bigger and broader than any comparable service anywhere in the world.”
Some of the content users can expect access to includes ICC and IPL cricket, long-running Indian soaps, kids content from India as well as Nickelodeon, as well as U.S. content from companies such as Water Bros Discovery/HBO, NBCUniversal, and Paramount. They also estimate that the new streaming service will make around “40 to 50 originals” in languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Karnataka.
Cricket will also be featured on the streaming service including the widely popular Indian Premier League. Also joining JioHotstar will be international ICC tournaments, the WPL women’s league, the grassroots Indian Street Premier League, and others.
Sanjog Gupta, CEO of JioStar Sports, will oversee the decision of live events for JioHotstar. They believe live streaming will have a large impact on the new service as a live stream of a Coldplay concert on Disney+ last month received more than 8.3 million streams.
JioHotstar also revealed that a new short-form initiative called “Sparks” will highlight popular digital creators in India by featuring two-minute videos associated with longer-form productions. There will also be new branding for JioHotstar developed by Venturethree.
Users who are already subscribed to JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar will have their accounts transferred over to JioHotstar and will be offered a subscription plan starting rate of ₹149 ($1.71) for three months.
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