JioStar’s entertainment boss tells Asia: India’s billion imaginations are now open for business

SINGAPORE: India isn’t just making content anymore. It’s becoming the content factory the world can’t ignore—and JioStar entertainment chief executive Kevin Vaz arrived in Singapore to make sure everyone got the memo.
At the Asia TV Forum & Market 2025, Vaz served up a keynote stuffed with eye-watering numbers and even bigger ambitions. His thesis? India’s 1.4 billion people—median age a sprightly 29—represent the planet’s most digitally ravenous audience, rewriting the rules on how stories get made, sold and binged.

The production stats alone are dizzying: 200,000 hours of telly annually, 1,800 films, over 400 web series, all pumped out across 22 official languages and 1,500-plus dialects. Add 900 million television viewers, 900 million internet users, and 85 million connected TV households, and you’ve got a media market where platforms aren’t just converging—they’re colliding at warp speed.

JioStar, the Reliance-Disney lovechild, is riding this wave like a seasoned surfer. On traditional telly, it commands a thumping 35 per cent market share with over 90 channels in ten languages, pulling in 760 million monthly viewers and bagging five of the country’s top ten shows. On digital, JioHotstar has racked up more than one billion app installs and 400 million monthly active users. Between broadcast and streaming, JioStar now reaches 99 per cent of India’s connected TV audience. That’s not a foothold—that’s a stranglehold.
Vaz rattled through the content playbook with gusto: women-led dramas sparking dinner-table debates, youth-skewing reality fare, beefed-up kids’ programming, and a sports portfolio he brazenly called “undisputed.” (With cricket rights in the bag, he’s not exactly bluffing.)

But the real action is in what’s next. JioStar is piling into AI-powered content creation, micro-format innovation—bite-sized dramas for the TikTok generation—and punting Indian IP to global buyers. Vaz’s endgame isn’t just shipping shows. It’s building what he calls a “global imagination ecosystem,” where data, culture and tech mash up to reinvent storytelling itself.

In other words: India’s content industry has  grown up, gone digital, and wants a seat at the global top table. JioStar reckons it’s got the audience, the infrastructure and the swagger to claim it. And judging by Vaz’s Singapore pitch, they’re not asking permission.