MUMBAI: JioStar chief executive of sports and live experiences Sanjog Gupta knows how to play it well. He took the SVG India Summit stage on 5 May and delivered a fiery address that was part state-of-play, part future manifesto, and full of pride. This was despite him recovering from a bout of flu.
From JioStar’s record-breaking cricket broadcasts to the turbocharged rise of JioHotstar, Gupta dropped numbers and punchlines in equal measure.
“Since the IPL began, we’ve added three million pay TV homes and scaled to 280 million digital subscribers,” he said. “That’s not a curve; that’s a rocket.”
A year ago, Disney Star and Viacom18 were at each other’s throats. Today, they’re joined at the hip in JioStar—a media juggernaut Gupta calls the marriage of “Star’s creativity and Jio’s connectivity.”
In under 90 days, JioHotstar was born, merging two massive platforms with 250 million monthly users each. Since then, it’s broken just about every sports viewership record across both TV and OTT, from Test series highs to the biggest-ever WPL and IPL starts.
But this isn’t just about cricket. Gupta unveiled JioStar’s new vertical—live experiences—which aims to blend collective fan energy with next-gen storytelling and interactivity. “We don’t want to just serve today—we want to shape tomorrow,” he declared.
He outlined JioStar’s four commandments for partners:
1. Think consumer, night and day
2. Be bold, nimble, and humble
3. Chase creativity, not just ideas
4. Execute relentlessly
But the mic-drop moment came when Gupta demoed MaxView 2.0—a souped-up, AI-powered vertical viewing experience designed for mobile fans. Swipe up for bite-sized moments. Swipe left for alternate angles and HeroCam views. Tap once and you’re back in the live game.
“Screens are getting smaller, but the experience is getting bigger,” he quipped. “One taxi driver watches it at red lights. One guy told me he watches in the office without anyone noticing. That’s what we call stealth sports.”
Since MaxView’s rollout, JioHotstar has clocked 25 per cent higher engagement from users on mobile. The mission now?
One fan, many feeds—a world where each viewer gets a bespoke experience tailored to their individual moods, moments and devices.
As Gupta put it: “Not many fans as one, but one fan as many.”
Clearly, that should sweep fans all the way to the boundary – with lots of glee.