Uday Shankar rewrites media playbook: Hire rock stars, back failure, bet on AI

New Delhi: Calling this “a great time” for content creators, JioStar Vice Chairman Uday Shankar has urged Indian media leaders to stop blaming the state of the industry and instead confront their own reluctance to experiment, disrupt and reimagine formats in an age where consumers are “surrounded by content all the time”. 

In a candid conversation with Gaurav Banerjee, Chair, CII National Council on Media & Entertainment and MD & CEO, Sony Pictures Networks India, Shankar argued that the real constraint on growth is not demand, but the mindset of “premium” television and streaming executives who remain trapped in legacy definitions of their business. 

“I have always been an optimist. And I remain very optimistic, very excited about the future of the industry,” he said. “People are consuming more content than they ever were… It’s content all the way. Now, we have chosen to artificially constrain our own industry. That is our problem.” 

‘Our job is not to be TV, our job is to tell great stories’

Shankar said the starting point is to redefine what the “industry” actually is. For him, it is not TV channels versus streamers, but “creators and providers of exciting content to consumers that gets their disproportionate attention”. 

“When I apply that lens, the industry is in great shape,” he told the packed room, pointing out that the historical battle to get people in front of a device has been won by the mobile phone. “Everybody’s carrying a mobile phone all the way, all the time… We are limited by our own imagination, and our desire to experiment and re-engage with the consumers.” 

Banerjee recalled an early strategy meeting at Star, where Shankar had warned against becoming obsessed with distribution and hardware. “You said that we have to think of ourselves as content creators. Our job is not to be TV. Our job is to make great stories that people want to connect with,” Banerjee said, noting that the same clarity is now being applied to the broader future of media. 

Shankar linked many of today’s challenges in TV and streaming to an attachment to old formats and windows. He questioned why the industry continues to behave as if a “religion” had prescribed that content must come only in 30- or 60-minute multiples when the world is making “billions and billions of dollars” from short-form content. 

“The game has changed,” he said, using cricket as an analogy. “There is a Test match, there is an ODI, there is a T20, and there is The Hundred. If we choose to continue to play only a Test match, then we can’t complain that the stadiums are not getting filled. That is the real issue.” 

From expensive data to Hotstar: betting on the future, not the present

Looking back at Star’s early leap into streaming, Shankar underlined that transformational bets rarely look logical in the moment. When Star started working on OTT, 1GB of data cost more than Rs 50 and even 3G was still being rolled out. 

“A very big veteran of the industry then told me that I had two problems: I had become too successful and my bosses had too much trust in me,” Shankar recalled, adding that he was advised not to “bother about streaming in India” because data was so expensive. 

“Yet, I have always looked at only two things: we as providers and consumers. Everything in between is temporary.” 

For him, access devices, distribution technologies and business models will keep changing, but the opportunity remains as long as there are people who want to consume compelling content, and companies willing to shed legacy constraints to serve them on their terms. 

He contrasted this with the early days of television news, when even the biggest story could not reach viewers until they came home in the evening and turned on their TV sets. 

“Now, it’s such a glorious freedom that you can deliver the news to them as and when, whenever,” he said, pointing to the shift from waiting “like monsoon farmers for the evening” to an always-on, always-connected world. 

‘Don’t collect skills, learn the skill to acquire skills’

Asked by Banerjee how professionals and teams can prepare for a future in which there is no precedent, from 24x7 news to streaming to the next disruption, Shankar was blunt: “You cannot second guess what will happen in the future. You can just prepare yourself to be nimble and open minded and ready to seize the opportunity.” 

Taking aim at the industry’s obsession with formal expertise, he said he is “not a big believer in acquiring skills” in the conventional sense. A liberal arts student who became a political journalist and then went on to build businesses in entertainment, sports and streaming, he argued that any specific skill has a finite lifespan. 

“If skills were important, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” he said. “I’m a huge believer in developing the skill to acquire skills. Skills have finite lifespan. But if you train yourself to see a new skill and pick that up quickly, that is when you keep progressing.” 

“History has told us that surprises keep coming at human society… And the ones who have survived are the ones who are adaptable,” he said, warning media professionals against clinging to expiring capabilities, like editors who never moved beyond legacy hardware. 

“Media people are very good at telling the world what’s happening and how it should behave. They’re not very good at learning this for themselves,” he noted, adding that the same mindset shift that allowed media to navigate the digital revolution is now needed again as AI and new formats reshape the landscape. 

Talent: hiring for 100% in one subject, not 85% in ten

One of the most discussed segments of the conversation was Shankar’s take on talent, an area where his track record of grooming leaders is widely acknowledged in the industry. Banerjee pointed out that Shankar was “overwhelmed” only once by his own media coverage: a recent story on ten senior executives who had worked with him and now run different companies across India. 

Asked to decode the “Uday Shankar method”, he began by rejecting the standard IIT-IIM filter in hiring. “Most of us hire… this person has gone to IIT, good for the person, what can I do about that? This person has gone to IIM, great… For the next role, IIT-IIM, for the other role also, IIT-IIM,” he said, arguing that this reveals a lack of clarity about what the organisation actually needs. 

Instead, he compared good hiring to a sharp cricket coach building a squad with specific roles, not generic “talent”. “You don’t go and say, ‘Get me two opening batsmen.’ A successful coach goes and says, I need one right-handed opening batsman, one left-handed opening batsman… one guy who’s very good with new ball, and another when it reverse swings,” he said. 

“I don’t need someone who has 85% in all ten subjects… Give me a person who has 100% in one subject, and maybe the person has failed in every other subject. But then I know that for this particular subject, this is the best person I can find,” he added. 

Such specialists, he said, may be “rock stars, difficult people,” but when 20–30 of them are brought together, “you’ve got all verticals covered” and the quality of discussion rises because “good, capable people have the ability to challenge everybody”. He stressed that leaders must also back these people when experiments fail: “At the first sign of trouble, you can’t dump them. That is the worst thing ethically, morally, and strategically in leadership.” 

‘If your experiments aren’t failing, you’re not innovating’

Banerjee pressed Shankar on his much-discussed risk appetite, narrating two examples from his own career, an expensive live broadcast from Everest base camp and the big-budget Marathi historical “Raja Shiv Chhatrapati”, where Shankar approved bold spends in minutes despite internal finance pushback. 

“For me, life is about experiments and innovation. And experiments and innovations, if they’re not failing, then you’re not experimenting, then you’re just rinsing and repeating,” Shankar replied. 

He cited ‘Panchvi Pass’, one of Star’s most expensive shows at the time and a major flop, as a turning point. Recounting a review meeting with Rupert Murdoch, he said he eventually raised the failure himself, only to be told: “That’s the nature of the beast. Don’t allow it to haunt you. Go and do the next experiment.” 

“I’ve been blessed to have worked with people like them,” Shankar said, also crediting India Today’s Arun Purie for backing last-minute format changes when Aaj Tak was launched as a 24x7 news channel. “I have had people who have shown faith in my failure. And I just carry the baton.” 

That philosophy powered one of Star’s most disruptive shows, ‘Satyamev Jayate’. Shankar revealed that the idea came when Star Plus was “at the peak of its success”, not in distress. “I believe that you should experiment when you are very strong… Star Plus was the monarch of all that it surveyed. So it wasn’t coming from a place of distress,” he said. 

‘Satyamev Jayate’, anchored by Aamir Khan, broke almost every rule of mainstream GEC programming, from a Sunday morning slot to a serious social-issue format that some inside the company derided as a “social documentary” that would air when “the nation sleeps”, even as the sales team was asked to sell ad spots at a premium to IPL. 

“I had no idea if it would be successful,” Shankar admitted. “But I have always believed that you have a much better chance of success if you’re disrupting status quo, rather than swimming with the status quo… It completely changed the framework of what could go on an entertainment channel.” 

Restlessness and the next disruption: AI

Banerjee ended the conversation by returning to a deeply personal theme for Shankar: restlessness. He recalled a 2020 phone call in which Shankar, then at the helm of Star, told him he was leaving because he was “not feeling restless anymore”. 

“There is an innate restlessness in me,” Shankar said. “If everything is working fine, then I get very restless, and I go and tinker around with that. But that’s also what drives me.” 

Today, that restlessness is directed at two fronts: raising the bar on live cricket production, where he believes there is still room for improvement despite Indian broadcasts “writing the global script” for standards; and harnessing AI to reinvent content creation. 

“I’m feeling incredibly excited about what AI can do,” he said. “Our creativity was only limited by financials and technical resources. Both of those, at a lower cost [and] greater production flexibility, are becoming available to us. Why should we not get excited about it?” 

Addressing fears in the creative community, he argued that AI can expand, not shrink, opportunity for talent. 

“An actor could do only one show at a time. Now you can do six shows at a time… If you have genuine value and if the audiences really want to see you, you can create multiple avatars and you could be shooting 10 shows at the same time,” he said, adding that everyone in the industry must decide whether to “swim” with change or try to hold the ground and “get swept away”. 

Shankar closed with a lesson from his early days as a trainee journalist, when an editor told him to treat every day as if it were his last. 

“If you really were to go down today, how would you like to be remembered?” he asked the room, urging media professionals to focus less on protecting the past and more on doing things “that have not been done before”.