JioStar bets big on AI with new content studio JAMS

MUMBAI: Reliance is done asking viewers to choose between watching, shopping and scrolling. At Reliance’s 49th AGM on Friday, Akash Ambani unveiled JioStar GenAI Media Studio, or JAMS for short, an end-to-end AI content pipeline built to take a story from raw idea through image, audio and video to finished production, all without leaving Bharat’s own backyard. Ambani said JAMS aims to nurture a new generation of creative technologists who can blend storytelling with AI to produce premium content across languages and formats, for India and the world.

He also unveiled a clutch of AI-led innovations to go with it. AI Snapshot is a personalised recap engine that stitches a viewer’s key moments into its own narrative, generated and served straight to the screen. Content-commerce features let users shop without ever leaving their favourite show or live stream. And Multiview lets the chronically indecisive watch entertainment, sport and news side by side on a single screen, sparing nobody the agony of choosing.

The announcement landed as JioStar wrapped its first full year of operations since the Jio Studios-Network18 merger, an ecosystem Ambani called India’s most powerful media platform. The numbers back the claim: FY26 revenue of Rs 34,917 crore, EBITDA of Rs 5,842 crore and net profit of Rs 3,434 crore. JioStar remains India’s leading television network with a 34.7 per cent viewership share, nearly equal to its next three rivals combined, pulling in 389 million viewers daily. On digital, JioHotstar averaged 451 million monthly active users in FY26, a scale Ambani described as among the largest anywhere in the world and the largest in India.

The platform has kept setting global benchmarks. During India’s victorious T20 World Cup campaign, JioHotstar logged a world-record 72.5 million concurrent viewers, and nine of the ten highest global concurrency records now belong to the platform. IPL 2026 pulled in over 700 million viewers on JioHotstar alone. The platform also became the first Indian paid OTT service to cross 1 billion downloads, and is now available on 99 per cent of connected televisions in India. Its micro-content hub, Tadka, launched in April, racked up over 100 million users in under two months.

FY26 also saw a string of AI-led and interactive rollouts: ChatGPT-powered conversational discovery tuned to Indian accents and regional languages, in-app food ordering with Swiggy during IPL matches, and engagement tools spanning voting, live chat and meme creation. More than 100 million unique users have used these interactive features, generating north of 11 billion interactions, Ambani said.

Taken together, it is less a feature update than a statement of intent. JioHotstar is no longer simply trying to keep eyeballs on the screen. It wants every scroll, swipe and stream to double as a transaction, and on the evidence of Friday’s numbers, it shows no sign of slowing down.