Binge, click, eat: JioStar bets on content commerce as its next big revenue engine

MUMBAI: Somewhere in India this spring, a cricket fan paused the live stream on JioHotstar, tapped a few buttons, and ordered 100 burgers. Not for a party, apparently, just the one transaction. Unverified in motive, but undeniable in fact, it became the defining anecdote of one of the most audacious experiments in the history of Indian media.

During this year’s Indian Premier League, JioHotstar and Swiggy ran an in-app food-ordering service embedded directly into the live stream, available across 690 cities, built exclusively for mobile, letting viewers browse restaurant menus, unlock match-triggered offers, place orders and track deliveries, all without leaving the cricket. Over 37 million consumers used it. One placed 34 separate orders across the season. Another ordered those 100 burgers in a single go. Burgers, improbably, pipped biryani as the most-ordered item.

The numbers are striking. The ambition behind them is more so.

To understand why this experiment matters, start with the size of the stage. JioHotstar, the streaming platform born from the merger of Reliance’s Viacom18 and Walt Disney’s India unit, has been on a trajectory that strains credulity. By the end of the 2025 IPL season, it had crossed 300 million subscribers, closing in on Netflix’s global count. The IPL’s digital audience alone reached 652 million viewers, overtaking television’s reach of 537 million, a historic inversion. At peak concurrency, 55.2 million people were watching simultaneously. Every day for over two months, JioHotstar was delivering audiences twice the size of the Super Bowl.

The platform streams in 12 languages across 25-plus feeds. It offers 4K streaming, AI-driven insights, real-time stats overlays and voice-assisted navigation. It has reimagined what live sports on a screen can feel like. And yet, for Uday Shankar, vice chairman of JioStar, all of that is the table stakes. The harder question, the one he has been wrestling with for years, is what to do with the audience once you have them.

Speaking to Fortune India, Shankar laid out his diagnosis of the industry’s structural problem with unusual bluntness. “The default for media has always been innovation in content. We always think content first and that everything else will follow. If the content innovations look very interesting, we think the job is done,” he said. “Be it print, radio, TV or streaming, content innovation has always been the focus. However, the only way to monetise the content has been through advertising and subscription. That’s a huge limitation in my mind.”

The advertising pool, once the preserve of broadcasters, has been invaded from all sides. E-commerce companies run their own ad networks. Delivery platforms tout their reach to brands. The duopoly of Google and Meta has hoovered up the digital market. “Our pool of income has been hit by everybody,” Shankar told Fortune India. “And we haven’t created anything new.”

JioStar is not short of resources with which to confront this problem. The company spent Rs 25,000 crore on content in 2024 and Rs 30,000 crore in 2025, with a further Rs 32,000-33,000 crore budgeted for 2026, more than $10 billion in three years, all of it aimed squarely at Indian audiences. “When global companies announce content spends, they often aim at international audiences,” Shankar has said. “Our investments are made for Indian viewers, and recovered from them.” That is a bet of colossal size. It demands a return that advertising and subscription revenues alone may struggle to deliver.

Content commerce is Shankar’s answer. The concept is simple enough to state: use what a media platform uniquely knows about its audience, what they watch, when, in what mood, in what city, to drive transactions in the moment of maximum engagement. A cricket match is not just a broadcast event; it is a predictable emotional arc, rich in triggers. The ball flies over mid-wicket for a six, the crowd roars, and somewhere in the 55 million-strong simultaneous viewership, millions of people want a snack. Swiggy was there.

Jiostar chief executive of sports Ishan Chatterjee framed it thus: “Streaming platforms will no longer operate in isolation, but as integrated environments that anticipate and enable what users want to do in the moment. Bringing together live sports and real-time commerce is an early expression of that future, one where engagement is not just about watching, but about acting in the moment.” Swiggy food marketplace chief executive Rohit Kapoor noted that ordering food during a match had already become instinctive behaviour for millions; the partnership simply streamlined it. The ‘Match On, Munch On’ campaign that accompanied the launch was amplified across television, digital and social media.

Shankar is clear that the Swiggy tie-up is a proof of concept, not a ceiling. “You just need to know what each customer wants and go very targeted. We have the ability to do that now,” he told Fortune India. “I am excited about this Swiggy experiment. It’s a huge piece of engineering.” More such content commerce deals, he promises, are on their way.

The idea of blending content and commerce is not unique to India. In the US, Amazon has been expanding its ‘Shop the Show’ feature across thousands of Prime Video titles, letting viewers purchase products they see on screen without picking up their phones. Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio, Instacart’s partnership with NBCUniversal, and Kroger’s integration with Roku are all expressions of the same thesis: the television screen is the new commerce battleground. Connected TV advertising in the US is projected to hit $33 billion by 2025 and is on course to overtake linear TV by 2028. According to a survey by Emarketer, more than half of American consumers say they are at least somewhat likely to shop from a digital marketplace featuring items shown on a TV programme.

But there is a difference between embedding shoppable ads into a prestige drama and building a full transactional infrastructure around a live cricket match with 55 million concurrent viewers in a single country. What JioHotstar has done is, in scale and speed, something the global streaming industry has not yet matched. Shankar is not wrong to call it a significant engineering achievement.

Sceptics might note that content commerce is easier to describe than to monetise at scale. That is fair. But Shankar has a habit of being right about these things ahead of the market. As chief executive of Star India, which became Disney Star and is now JioStar, he pushed subscription revenue as a serious alternative to advertising at a time when few in Indian media believed viewers would pay. He introduced the freemium model: free content to draw audiences in, then a nudge towards paid tiers. Today, he says, JioStar’s subscription revenue comfortably exceeds its advertising income. The man who persuaded hundreds of millions of Indians to pay for television they once got free has form.

He has also been emphatic that JioStar should be understood as a technology company that delivers content, not a content company that dabbles in technology. That distinction is load-bearing. A technology company can build commerce infrastructure, collect transaction data, run personalisation algorithms, and cut revenue-sharing deals with delivery partners. A broadcaster cannot. “We are limited only by our imagination, how to use it,” Shankar told Fortune India. “Monetising through just vanilla subscription or advertising is not going to take you to the next level.”

AI is a further arrow in the quiver. At the India AI Impact Summit earlier this year, Shankar argued that artificial intelligence will fundamentally alter how content is created, discovered and monetised. “There will be huge amounts of customisation and targeting more relevant content for user cohorts,” he said, adding that AI would dramatically compress production timelines and open content creation to a far wider set of participants.

Subscription was early days once too. When Shankar first championed it, the conventional wisdom in Indian media was that no one would pay for what they could watch free. He was right then. Content commerce, the idea that 300 million subscribers represent not just an audience but a marketplace, is his next frontier. The infrastructure is in place, the data advantage is real, and the appetite, judging by 37 million dinner orders during a cricket tournament, is demonstrable.

The 100-burger man may have been an outlier. But the instinct he acted on, to eat, transact, engage, all within the stream, is exactly what Shankar is building for. If he is right again, the living room becomes a shop, the cricket match becomes a checkout page, and the media industry’s oldest revenue problem quietly gets solved over biryani. Or, apparently, burgers.