JioHotstar bets Rs 4,000 crore on the south’s storytelling surge

CHENNAI: JioHotstar is staking Rs 4,000 crore on a wager that southern India’s creative revolution will define the country’s entertainment future. The streaming platform, barely ten months into its existence, unveiled plans on 9th December to pump that sum into building what it calls the country’s most powerful south-focused content and creator ecosystem. Over the next 12 months, 1,500 hours of fresh southern programming will roll out.

The Head of the Subscription Video-on-Demand Business and Chief Marketing Officer at JioStar, Sushant Sreeram, along with the Head of the Entertainment Business, South Cluster at JioStar, Krishnan Kutty, led the announcement. The scale of investment signals not just growth but a long-term conviction that southern narratives will fuel India’s next entertainment surge.

The platform’s rationale is straightforward: southern India has rapidly emerged as one of JioHotstar’s strongest growth engines, outperforming the rest of the country in subscription depth, retention and connected television adoption. Southern entertainment on the platform has achieved 99.96 per cent pincode presence across India. Close to 45 per cent of southern viewers watch JioHotstar on connected televisions, making it one of the country’s earliest and fastest-growing connected television-first markets.

Sreeram highlighted JioHotstar’s 400 million strong user base and its position as the country’s only streaming destination with more than 300,000 hours of entertainment. The platform now serves audiences across 100 per cent of India’s pincodes and has built the country’s largest connected television universe with more than 85 million devices.

Kutty emphasised that the south doesn’t follow trends, it creates them. From pan-India blockbusters to pioneering new formats, southern stories today reverberate across the country. Southern consumers are digital first, highly discerning and increasingly exploratory. They are widening the genres they engage with and pushing creators to tell bolder, more diverse and culturally rooted stories.

The numbers bear this out. Over 80 per cent of Malayalam watch time is driven by viewers outside Kerala. Heartbeat emerged as the biggest show ever with over 100 million hours of watch time this year. Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra and Mirai became the platform’s most-watched films this year, whilst movies like Thudarum and Tourist Family also notched record-breaking viewership.

Bigg Boss viewership from the south alone commands a scale larger than the entire viewership of the next closest streaming platform. Southern consumers spend nearly 70 per cent more time on JioHotstar compared to the rest of India, demonstrating exceptional stickiness and loyalty. Their curiosity, selectivity and appetite for diverse storytelling make them not just viewers but trendsetters shaping the platform’s creative direction.

In the last ten months, JioHotstar has collaborated with over 500 writers, directors and showrunners, with almost 75 per cent of this year’s southern originals choosing the platform as their home. The platform is also engaging with the Government of Tamil Nadu to strengthen the creative ecosystem, from supporting creative labs to enabling internships and participating in state-driven programmes.

Asked how the platform would avoid a one-size-fits-all approach given southern audiences’ diverse linguistic tastes, Kutty explained that technology drives personalisation. “What we’re trying to do is really design content meant for different cohorts of audiences,” he said. The platform’s algorithms predict and surface content based on viewing behaviour. “A story like Lokah possibly would have only been accessible to consumers in Kerala, maybe it would have gone to Tamil Nadu, but because there are signals which our platform has got, we are able to surface the content to a consumer in Meerut who potentially could be interested in it”. Southern audiences, Kutty added, are also receptive to advertising on the platform.

With sustained investments, strategic partnerships and a commitment to empowering creators, JioHotstar reckons it is capturing the pulse of southern audiences. Whether Rs 4,000 crore proves sufficient to cement that dominance, or merely whets appetites for more, will become clear as those 1,500 hours begin streaming. For now, the south’s creative surge has found its deepest-pocketed champion.