Television
JioStar clean-bowls the Asia-Pacific broadcast awards with a two-trophy haul
India’s streaming and broadcast giant bags top honours for two platforms it built entirely in-house, and didn’t buy from anyone
SINGAPORE: JioStar, India’s broadcasting and streaming colossus, has done what most media companies only PowerPoint about: built two genuinely award-winning technology platforms entirely in-house, then walked off with the trophies to prove it. At the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting+ Awards 2026, the Mumbai-based giant claimed wins in both the digital content platform and sports broadcasting categories, leaving the field rather comprehensively stumped.
The first prize went to SportsCentral, JioStar’s unified sports content operations platform. If live sports broadcasting is organised chaos dressed in a suit, SportsCentral is the person who irons that suit at three in the morning and still makes the deadline. It pulls end-to-end content operations into a single scalable system, streamlining workflows that would otherwise have editors, producers and schedulers communicating largely by shouting across open-plan offices.
The second, and rather more dazzling, win was for JioStar’s automated AI cricket highlights system. The platform watches live cricket, ball by ball, over by over, and generates highlight packages in real time, without a bleary-eyed editor fast-forwarding through six hours of footage at midnight. For a nation in which cricket occupies the cultural space that football, therapy and competitive religion jointly fill elsewhere, automating the highlights pipeline at scale is no trivial undertaking. The system sees the six, cuts the six, packages the six. Promptly.
Both platforms were developed entirely by JioStar’s own people, a point worth underlining in an industry that tends to reach for a third-party vendor the moment a problem exceeds one slide on a presentation. The achievement spans teams across sports technology and media operations, data science, sports content operations and editorial. Among those who can claim a share of the glory: Ishan Chatterjee, Rajat Nigam, Siddharth Sharma, Farzin Najmi, Gajendra Tijare, Sunil Pasricha, Sumit Chaudhary, Joju Chittilappilly Jacob, Natasha Sharma and Satya Ravi Teja Narkedimilli.
JioStar already commands one of the largest streaming audiences on the planet, its platforms carrying cricket, Bollywood and enough content to keep a billion-odd viewers occupied indefinitely. Adding a pair of Asia-Pacific broadcasting trophies to that résumé suggests the technology operation is no longer merely keeping pace with the content ambitions. It may, quietly, be ahead of them.
Two awards. Zero vendor invoices. JioStar’s engineers will take that.
