What JioHotstar’s South-first strategy means for OTT, creators and advertisers

Chennai: JioHotstar is building South India as the engine of its OTT business, lining up a Rs 4,000-crore investment in the region over the next five years and betting on a connected TV-heavy model, JioStar executives Sushant Sreeram and Krishnan Kutty said.

In a joint interaction around the launch of JioHotstar’s new South slate, ‘JioHotstar South Unbound’, Sreeram, Head, SVOD Business and Chief Marketing Officer, JioStar, and Kutty, Head, Entertainment (South), JioStar, said the strategy is driven by South India’s higher content appetite, broader genre sampling and faster-than-expected connected TV adoption.

Kutty said the South has long been one of Star’s strongest regions, both in terms of audience and revenue, and that carried into JioHotstar’s planning.

Investing in the South, he said, was “a very, very key consideration” from the time the streaming business was conceived.

Higher content appetite

“The South traditionally has always watched more content. So even in the TV world, the number of hours of content that people would watch on TV in the South has always been significantly higher,” he said.

Sreeram said what stands out now is not just time spent but the range of content South audiences are willing to try.

“They’re expanding into a lot more diverse segments of entertainment. So it’s not about spending more time consuming more of what they already watch,” he said.

He linked this to “a culture of very diverse storytelling” and “a huge appetite and fascination with stories as a means of communal interaction”.

That appetite shows up in internal data, with South viewers spending more time on the platform than the rest of India.

Hits such as Heartbeat have crossed 100 million hours of watch time, while a majority of Malayalam viewing now comes from outside Kerala.

Kutty argued that this behaviour is forcing JioHotstar to think of streaming as a daily-use service in the region, not an occasional destination.

“We want to make JioHotstar a platform that you end up on daily,” he said. “So we’re very excited about the scale of business we can build in the South.”

Dual revenue model

On monetisation, both executives stressed that JioHotstar does not see subscription and advertising as an either-or choice.

“We are keen on building dual streams of revenue. We are keen on building a subscription business, and we are keen on building an ad business,” Kutty said.

“We are very keen that we build a sustainable business,” he added, arguing that the “biggest service we can kind of do for our consumers is provide them the widest range of content at the most accessible price.”

Sreeram called it a “slippery slope” to programme purely based on how content will be monetised.

“If we consistently deliver value to a segment of customers or a cohort of customers, I think we will be able to build a commercial model using these twin engines of subscriptions and advertising out of it,” he said.

Open funnel pricing

He described JioHotstar’s proposition as an open funnel where “anybody can come to the platform and start watching anything for free”, with the company then using different signals to decide when to nudge viewers towards a paid relationship.

Accessible pricing has been central to JioHotstar’s South play and has paid off in overall scale, Kutty said.

When the plans were first discussed internally, he admitted he worried they were too aggressive.

But the subsequent surge in users changed his view.

“When you grow 6X and 7X in terms of platform size, then the entire world of possibilities that opens for us as a platform is, you know, dramatically different,” he said, calling the decision to prioritise access and penetration “one of the big strategic calls” the company has gotten right.

South content pipeline

On the content side, the Rs 4,000-crore commitment to South programming over the next five years is already being deployed.

The money is being spread across scripted originals, non-fiction and movies in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada, with Kutty indicating that original series and non-fiction will see a strong push even as movies remain central to the portfolio.

JioHotstar plans to keep backing theatrical films with a digital window rather than pivot fully to direct-to-digital, with the current South window at about four weeks.

Kutty underlined that “all our scripted shows and movies and non-fiction are exclusive”, and that the platform sees a healthy mix between films that release theatrically before streaming and a smaller set of direct-to-digital titles.

Theatrical runs, he said, serve consumers and producers well and act as “an extremely great word-of-mouth mechanism”, after which streaming extends reach.

Stories that travel

A key part of the South strategy is to back stories that can travel beyond their home markets without being over-engineered for crossover.

Kutty pointed to the upcoming show Pharma as an example.

In the series, Nivin Pauly plays the lead, with Rajesh Sharma added “to make this more accessible to Hindi audiences”.

But, he said, “by and large, we are… the choices we are making are saying, hey, listen, let’s bet on the story. Let’s bet on the creator. And let us trust our consumers to watch content, to watch a great story. And whether it’s through subtitling, whether it’s through dubbing, you know, to follow a great story.”

That bet, he said, “has turned out to be right more often than not.”

He said the same philosophy underpins JioHotstar’s pitch to filmmakers and showrunners.

“I think the essential opportunity we offer is the ability to get your audience story to the widest audience,” Kutty said.

“You have a creator from Madurai, and his story can be watched in Meerut. And his story cannot be watched; his story will be watched in Meerut. We will find consumers in Meerut for whom we believe that story is relevant. And we will surface that content to that consumer.”

CTV surge in South

On the product side, Sreeram said JioHotstar initially focused tech investments on mobile, given the expected scale of audiences on phones.

“We were obviously very bullish about the scale of audiences that we can serve,” he said.

What surprised the team, he admitted, was just how rapidly and how comprehensively audiences in the South have taken to consuming JioHotstar on CTV.

Today, he said, about 45 per cent of JioHotstar consumption in the South is on connected TVs, well ahead of the Indian average.

At the roundtable, the company said it now reaches around 85 million connected TV devices in a national CTV universe it pegged at 95–100 million, giving it what Sreeram called “a very large CTV or connected TV reach”.

Big-screen experience push

That has forced JioStar to “speed up” investments in the big-screen experience.

“The expectations from a consumer or from a family are so much more when they’re watching something on a big screen. It needs to be immersive. You need to have 4K. You need to have Dolby. All of these things become so much more important,” he said.

At the same time, he said, the platform has to keep the mobile experience robust for live sports and entertainment across 4G, 5G and lower-bandwidth networks.

Creative ecosystem push

The Rs 4,000-crore South investment also ties into a wider push to build creative infrastructure on the ground, particularly in Tamil Nadu.

Sreeram said JioHotstar is working with the state government to create training and upskilling programmes “for skills in front of the camera as well as behind the camera”, and to set up creative labs where young talent can pitch and develop ideas.

The partnership, formalised through a Letter of Intent with the government, also includes support for festivals and initiatives to promote Tamil and other South Indian stories globally.

Lean-in ad environment

For advertisers and agencies, Sreeram positioned JioHotstar as a professionally produced, lean-in environment.

He commented, “We have an audience; we call ourselves a professionally generated content business. What that means is a very lean-forward audience that is invested in what they are consuming, what they are watching.”

As a result, he said, “for any associations or partnerships or brands or integrations or just reach-based advertising, brands are essentially speaking to an audience that is very lean in.”

He said repeat demand is strong.

“I find that we have a large section of these brands and advertisers who keep coming back. Three quarters of what we generate as revenue just in the South is actually from advertisers who keep coming back,” he said, calling this “the best yardstick” of whether the platform is delivering value.

Local advertisers surge

Local brands, Kutty added, are leaning in as they themselves shift viewing behaviour.

He said JioStar has seen its local advertising client base rise by around 60–70 per cent, attributing this in part to the idea that “local advertisers like to put money in what they watch”.

Big-ticket properties such as Bigg Boss from the South, he said, now attract a majority of local advertisers and deliver audiences larger than those of the next-biggest OTT player in the region.