Jiostar banks on entertainment, GST tailwinds and CTV to sustain post-IPL momentum

New Delhi: JioStar has hit a jackpot with Rs 7,232 crore revenue and Rs 1,322 crore profit in Q2 FY26. With the IPL season behind it, the company is banking on its entertainment pipeline to keep users engaged. 
Jiostar is leaning on a heavier slate of entertainment, improving GST-led demand and higher Connected TV (CTV) monetisation to extend gains after the IPL spike, even as traditional TV advertising from FMCG remains patchy, said Kevin Vaz, CEO – Entertainment, JioStar during an earnings call.

“With the IPL came an influx of a huge number of audiences. Our biggest challenge was how to convert these audiences to remain on the platform and watch our entertainment content,” Vaz said. 

The platform retained 400 million monthly active users post-IPL by shifting audiences from cricket into marquee shows and high-frequency drops. “This quarter for us was a lot of entertainment. Bigg Boss across languages has performed exceedingly well with a 54% growth in watch time on JioHotstar,” he added.

Scripted franchises continued to drive depth. He said, “Special Ops turned out to be the second highest-watched series on the platform, only to follow Criminal Justice, and remained number one for four weeks in a row.” 

To build daily habits, Jiostar used long-arc drops. Vaz highlighted, “One of the objectives for JioHotstar is to get consumers to come to us on a daily basis. We offered series with 100 episodes and saw consumers coming to the platform for 100 days.” 

Vaz called Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi Season 2 the company’s “biggest show across TV and digital and our biggest launch in five years on the platform, showing 2x growth over our best ever show.”
Premium homes, he said, “continue to be the go-to destination because each and every big American studio’s content is on this platform.”

On sports, Jiostar claimed leadership beyond cricket. “JioHotstar has become the largest sports platform. It is not just cricket; across sports is where people come to this platform.” The India–England Test series was “one of the most-watched test series on any digital platform to date—170 million viewers with 1.1 billion viewership time for live cricket.”

CTV is emerging as a key revenue lever. “As we grow monthly active users, it automatically reflects on revenue. CTV monetisation for us is much higher, and that is where you are seeing this growth,” Vaz said. “We are just at the start. Our objective was to transfer IPL audiences to entertainment. Content plus technology and customised recommendations have started to show results.”

Linear TV remained resilient. “In linear, our entertainment viewership share is 34.5, and our viewership is close to the combined viewership of the next three networks put together.” 

He added, “Linear TV ad revenue has shown double-digit growth quarter on quarter despite the challenging microenvironment,” though TV entertainment sales still faced pressure from FMCG cuts. “But with GST we are seeing green shoots and we expect the quarters ahead to be much better.”

“We delivered a record EBITDA with industry-leading margins,” Vaz said, attributing the performance to cost control, strong TV and digital subscriptions, and robust digital ad sales. 

Management cautioned that quarter-on-quarter comparisons are distorted by the IPL base in the previous quarter. “IPL gets us crores of people… so not really comparable,” the company said, noting the prior tournament window drew around 600 million viewers.

Jiostar plans to replicate the 100-episode daily-drop format across markets, keep investing in tent-pole entertainment to deepen engagement, and widen its CTV footprint to capture higher yields, while counting on GST-aided demand recovery to steady TV advertising.

JioStar's revenue in the first half of FY26 was at Rs 18,454 crore, and profit after tax stood at Rs 1,903 crore.

Reliance Industries (RIL), the Walt Disney Company and Viacom 18 Media Private had formally announced the merger of their TV and digital platforms on November 14, 2024.

JioHotstar, which was launched after the merger of two leading OTT platforms JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar on February 14, 2025, averaged 400 million MAUs (monthly active users) in the September quarter. This was led by "robust performance of both sports and entertainment properties", it said.