JioStar lines up Rs 12,000 crore South push, Rs 4,000 crore for Tamil Nadu content hub

Chennai: JioStar will invest Rs 12,000 crore across the four southern states over the next five years. Of this, Rs 4,000 crore will be spent on Tamil Nadu’s creative industry, with the plan expected to generate 1,000 direct jobs and 15,000 indirect jobs.

Tamil Nadu Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin announced the plan at JioHotstar’s ‘South Unbound’ event held in Chennai on December 9, 2025. “The beneficiaries will be our own artists, technicians, production teams and above all, content creators,” he said.

Additionally, JioStat's OTT platform, JioHotstar, announced that it aims to invest Rs 4,000 crore in building South-focused content and a creator ecosystem across the Southern states.

At the event, Sushant Sreeram, Head, SVOD Business and Chief Marketing Officer, JioStar, and Krishnan Kutty, Head, Entertainment (South), JioStar, detailed how the platform is repositioning its South slate as a growth engine for the combined JioHotstar business.

Sreeram framed the investment against the platform’s scale less than a year after launch. “In 10 months, we have been able to put together a roster of entertainment that includes live sports and become a large enough platform that 400 million Indians tune into every month,” he said. “This makes us potentially one of the largest media entertainment destinations digitally across the globe.”

He added that the subscription base has scaled in parallel. “Within a short span of time, we have been able to ramp up to more than 200 million subscribers,” Sreeram said. “This is the result of our investments in product, technology and distribution, and of being a platform for a very diverse set of storytellers and creators.”

According to the company, JioHotstar today offers more than 3 lakh hours of entertainment and reaches users in 100% of India’s pincodes. 

Sreeram said South India is at the front of JioHotstar’s connected TV push. “We actually see close to 40 to 45% of our South consumption on connected TV devices,” he said. “This explosion of connected TV consumption, with family-oriented viewing, has been faster than we anticipated.”

The leadership shared that JioHotstar’s stories are travelling far beyond core language markets and influencing national viewing behaviour. Over 80% of Malayalam watch time on JioHotstar now comes from viewers outside Kerala. 

Titles such as Heartbeat have emerged as the biggest ever on the platform with over 100 million hours of watch time this year, while Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra and Mirai rank among its most-watched movies, alongside record-breaking viewership for films like Thudarum and Tourist Family.

Kutty positioned the planned South investment as a response to how deeply regional stories are now driving platform consumption. “Whether you call it Kollywood, Tollywood, Sandalwood or Mollywood, it really is a creative powerhouse that is reverberating across the country,” he said. “The biggest piece is that the South doesn’t really follow trends; it creates them.”

He argued that South stories are likely to shape the next phase of India’s streaming growth. “I really believe the future of Indian storytelling is going to be told in the South,” Kutty said, pointing to a mix of large-scale films and innovative non-fiction and scripted formats that have travelled beyond their home markets.

On the back of this performance, Kutty emphasised JioHotstar’s commitment in the region. “We are committed to spending Rs 4,000 crore in this market on JioHotstar,” he said. “It is an extremely exciting commitment, and we are very excited to see what possibilities this throws up.”

JioHotstar will roll out 1,500 hours of fresh South programming over the next 12 months, across series, films and non-fiction. In the last 10 months alone, the platform has worked with more than 500 writers, directors and showrunners in the South, with “almost 75%” of this year’s South originals choosing JioHotstar as their home.

Kutty said viewing behaviour in the region underlines why JioStar is willing to spend at this scale. “Consumers in the South spend 70% more time on our platform than consumers across the rest of the country,” he said. 

He added that South subscribers are also sampling more genres and more individual titles than the all-India average, with many shows crossing language borders inside the app.

Stalin tied JioHotstar’s plans to the state’s own push for a “creative economy” built around film and digital content. “Our government is committed to building a strong creative economy,” he said, citing the proposed state-of-the-art global film city in Chennai and state-backed training and internship initiatives for young creators.

He welcomed JioStar’s commitment to work with the government on creator programmes. 

Sreeram said the Rs 4,000 crore commitment is part of a wider partnership with the Tamil Nadu government. “Earlier today, JioHotstar formalised a Letter of Intent with the Government of Tamil Nadu in the presence of Chief Minister M K Stalin. This sets out our shared commitment to invest in talent, strengthen infrastructure and help build a future-ready creative economy from the South,” he said.

Referring to proposed creative labs with Kamal Haasan and district-level outreach, Stalin said these initiatives would “reach creators in every district of the state” and help turn streaming growth into a more broad-based opportunity for young filmmakers and writers.

The minister also placed the OTT push in a longer arc of Tamil cinema. “OTT is not replacing cinema. It is expanding the universe of cinema,” he said. “It is creating space for new kinds of stories, formats and voices.”

For JioStar, the South Unbound event marks the first major slate announcement for the region since the JioHotstar app went live earlier this year.