Rishabh Engineer joins JioStar as associate director, acquisition and strategy

MUMBAI: Sports media in India has a small circle of dealmakers who actually know how rights negotiations work from the inside, and Rishabh Engineer has just moved into one of the biggest seats at the table. He has joined JioStar as associate director for acquisition and strategy, a role that puts him squarely at the intersection of domestic rights acquisition, monetisation and new revenue generation for Star Sports and JioHotstar, the country’s dominant sports broadcasting combine.

Engineer arrives with a résumé built almost entirely on rights deals. He spent over three years at FanCode, rising from manager to senior manager of media rights acquisition and partnerships, where he was responsible for acquiring licensing and media rights, strategising partner collaborations and negotiating contracts across cricket, football, motorsport, kabaddi and a clutch of emerging sports. He built that expertise by leaning on a network of international and domestic federations, media rights agencies and broadcasters, and drove revenue through syndication and distribution partnerships alongside licensing for FanCode’s e-commerce vertical.

Before FanCode, Engineer spent nearly eight years at Disney Star across product strategy and partnerships and sports events. In his brand partnerships role, he developed long-term content strategy with the likes of Meta, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, Glance, ShareChat, Josh and Moj, while structuring digital content strategy for Star Sports to sharpen reach and open up monetisation pipelines. He also built partnerships with more than 60 fan communities and influencers to drive organic engagement across sports properties, a skill set that translates directly into the fan-first monetisation playbook broadcasters now depend on.

His earlier stints at Disney Star delivered some genuinely inventive work. During the Hero Indian Super League’s sixth season, he ran a regional and community focused fan engagement strategy that lifted attendance by 15 per cent in Kerala and 47 per cent in Kolkata, two of the league’s core markets. A season later, amid the pandemic, he delivered India’s first ever virtual fanwall for a sports league, engaging close to 2 lakh fans over the course of that season. He also planned and executed the Star Re-Imagine Awards, one of Star India’s biggest marketing initiatives built to recognise IPL’s on-air sponsors.

Engineer’s entrepreneurial streak adds another dimension entirely. He co-founded Sports Stock Exchange, a fantasy gaming platform that fused basic stock exchange mechanics with live match engagement, becoming the first fantasy game to offer real-time engagement during live play. Recognised under the Start-Up India programme, the venture organically built a user base of over 500 players by partnering with major fan clubs including Bharat Army, Namma RCB and Whistle Podu Army, all achieved on a limited budget.

That mix of big-broadcaster rigour and startup scrappiness is precisely what makes the JioStar move interesting. As Star Sports and JioHotstar continue consolidating their grip on Indian sports broadcasting following the JioStar merger, the platform needs dealmakers who understand both the traditional rights economy and the digital-first, fan-engagement instincts that newer platforms like FanCode sharpened. Engineer, on paper, ticks both boxes.