Eros Innovation and RunnTV team up to launch FAST channels worldwide

MUMBAI: Hindi cinema is getting a serious push onto free television, and Eros Innovation is leading the charge. On July 24th the company, which describes itself as a “sovereign AI and cultural intelligence” outfit, announced a partnership with RunnTV, an Indian free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform, to launch two new channels, Eros Universe Bollywood Cinema and Eros Universe Entertainment, onto smart-TV screens the world over.

The logic is sound. Eros holds a library of more than 11,000 films, built up over four decades of Hindi and regional cinema. RunnTV supplies the infrastructure, handling channel creation, playout, ad monetisation and analytics, the technical groundwork that turns a film archive into a functioning television network. Together, the two firms plan to bring always-on Hindi cinema channels to connected-TV sets and smart-TV platforms from Los Angeles to Lagos, funded entirely through advertising rather than subscriptions.

The timing works in their favour. As cord-cutting reshapes traditional pay-TV and advertisers increasingly chase eyeballs on connected televisions, FAST channels have emerged as a smart way for content owners to unlock fresh value from catalogue titles that have already completed their theatrical and subscription-streaming runs. For a company with 11,000 titles at its disposal, this is a strong opportunity to reach new audiences at low incremental cost.

kumar ahuja, group chief operating officer at Eros Innovation, said the partnership marks an important step in making the company’s library “more accessible to viewers worldwide” and signalled plans to expand the FAST channel portfolio in the coming months. manish sinha, founder and chief executive of RunnTV, echoed the optimism, calling it an opportunity to build “compelling, high-quality FAST channels for global audiences.”

The deal also fits neatly into Eros’s broader growth story. The company has been building out an “AI infrastructure” arm alongside its content business, developing a family of large cultural models trained on its own archive, with the underlying data corpus valued at $1.7 billion by OxValue.AI, an Oxford University spin-out. Pairing that ambition with a proven, revenue-generating format like FAST gives Eros a practical, near-term monetisation route while its longer-term AI platforms continue to scale. With RunnTV’s distribution reach and Eros’s deep content vault, the partnership looks well placed to expand Hindi cinema’s global footprint on connected TV.