JioStar Urges Content Producers to Embrace Deals with Shared Risk Model
With broadcasters and streamers pushing for a more balanced model in which content producers share both the risk and the reward, content creation and financing are becoming major areas of disruption as India's media market matures.
This represents a shift away from one-sided deals and toward co-investment, which is already gaining traction.
According to Garg, the conventional approach, in which broadcasters and platforms assume all financial risk for content that may or may not be successful, is no longer viable.
"The broadcaster and media players have been bearing the risk of content for more than ten years," he stated. “It’s time the risk reward equation gets more balanced.”
Indian platforms are urging their content partners to adopt a more cooperative strategy as they seek to cater to the next generation of viewers. This entails sharing in the performance results and co-investing in content.
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"It won't be a free ride," he added, adding that partners need to be prepared to share the risk.
As entertainment options increase and large internet platforms vie for consumers' time and interest, he continued, media organizations need to continue making investments to remain relevant.
Garg presented a path to improve the economics of streaming in India through focused investment, creative revenue models, and long-term scale at APOS 2025 during a session titled Transforming the Media Investment Playbook: Case Studies & Perspectives alongside Media Partners Asia's Vivek Couto.
“We don’t want to build a service for just 15 to 20 million viewers in India. It’s a big market,” Garg said. “Our model is: how do we become relevant for the largest part of society? That’s where the top of the funnel will always remain our biggest priority.”
JioStar's streaming platform JioHotstar, formed through the merger of Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema, completed platform integration in a record four months. “We migrated two apps with different business models into one app, zero consumer loss, zero monetisation loss,” Garg said.
The next 12 to 18 months, he said, will focus on innovating the revenue model. “Globally, people have been slightly lazy when it comes to business model innovation in streaming. You’ll see a lot of new things from our team.”
In addition to developing a reward program targeted at everyday involvement, the company is working on diversifying its content, including micro-dramas. "Every Indian who has internet connection ought to visit us daily. We are after that north star.
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Garg emphasized that in order to compete at scale, streaming companies need to be highly capital-intensive.
In the broadcast and streaming markets, JioStar faces competition from Zee, Sony, Sun TV, Netflix, and Prime Video.