JioStar’s Kevin Vaz says forget reach, scale is now about what happens after the click

BALI: Scale is dead. Long live scale. That, in a nutshell, was the message from Kevin Vaz, chief executive, entertainment at JioStar, who used a fireside chat at APOS 2026 to puncture one of the media industry’s most sacred metrics.

“The definition of scale has changed,” Vaz told delegates, in a line that landed like a verdict. “Scale is not about how many people you reach. Scale is the impact you have on people’s lives after you reach them.”

It is a bold repositioning from a company that, by any measure, already reaches a staggering number of people. But Vaz was in no mood to talk numbers for the sake of numbers. He was talking responsibility.

JioStar, he said, sees itself as a technology company that happens to deliver content, not the other way round. “Storytelling will always be at the core of everything that we do,” he said, arguing that it drives engagement, fandom and cultural impact. The hard part, he added, is the plumbing behind it: “How that storytelling is transmitted, how it’s personalised, how it’s experienced, and how you do this at scale.”

Most of the heavy lifting this year, he revealed, has happened off-screen. “Most of the innovation that has come up in the last year, besides being in content, is actually on the technology front.” The partnership with OpenAI gets a mention as exhibit A, alongside bets on AI, discoverability and short-form video.

Brands, evidently, are paying attention. Vaz pointed to the tie-up with Samsung around the premiere of Dhurandhar The Revenge on JioHotstar, one of the platform’s biggest movie launches. The exclusive push for the Samsung Forever Offer on the flagship Galaxy S26 has already delivered, in his words, phenomenal traction, with deep viewer engagement feeding into strong conversion. A neat case study, he suggested, in how premium content can move product, not just eyeballs.

And it is not just gadgets shifting off the back of a show. JioStar has been busy turning the remote into a shopping cart. During cricket coverage, a partnership with Swiggy Instamart let viewers order food mid-match, customised to taste, without reaching for another app. On one of its biggest reality formats, a tie-up with NewMe meant fans voting for their favourite contestant could shop the exact outfit on screen in the same breath.

On the eternal small screen versus big screen debate, Vaz was characteristically blunt: the consumer could not care less. “India is an AND market, and that remains true today,” he said, dismissing industry-drawn lines between TV and digital as largely irrelevant to anyone actually holding the remote or the phone. “A consumer doesn’t look at it that way. From a consumer’s point of view, he simply comes to get entertained.”

The numbers back him up. India has crossed more than a billion internet connections, smartphone adoption keeps climbing, and JioHotstar alone counts more than 85 million connected TV homes. Consumers, Vaz said, want it both ways: the big screen experience with digital-grade personalisation.

That thinking shaped the rollout of Tadka, JioStar’s micro-drama play. Rather than spin off a separate app, the company folded short-form drama into the same platform as its long-form fare. The bet paid off fast: nearly 100 million consumers piled in within six to eight weeks of launch.

If there is a single thread running through all of it, it is this: the couch potato is extinct. “Entertainment will change from being passive consumption to a much more active, involved consumer,” Vaz said, sketching a future where audiences vote, game, chat with fellow fans and shop the look on screen, all at once, all in real time.

Reach, in other words, was never the finish line. For JioStar, the real scoreboard starts the moment the screen lights up.