Mumbai: At the SVG India Summit 2026, Ishan Chatterjee, CEO – Sports at JioStar, highlighted India’s growing role as a global innovation hub in sports broadcasting, driven by massive scale and evolving consumer engagement.
Referencing the scale of live sports in India, Chatterjee pointed to the Indian Premier League reaching over a billion screens last season, while JioHotstar recorded a global peak concurrency of 72.5 million viewers during the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 Final. He emphasised that scale alone is insufficient without meaningful engagement.
“Live sports has emerged as one of the only mediums that can aggregate consumers at this scale. Reaching 72.5 million people at once raises a question that matters far more than the number itself: what do you do with that attention? Scale without relevance is just reach.”
Chatterjee outlined the evolution of sports broadcasting from a uniform, one-way feed to more personalised and interactive experiences enabled by digital platforms.
“The first decade of sports broadcasting was defined by a ‘one size fits all’ broadcast feed where the match was a one-way dialogue between the rights holder and the consumer. With the growth of digital streaming, we moved away from that by personalising the viewing experience for large cohorts of fans through languages, multiple feeds, camera angles, graphics, and presentation formats. This matters to us because engaged viewers consume more content, stay longer, and become power users across our platforms. For example, over the last year, our regional language watch-time share has grown 2X. Our Bhojpuri and Haryanvi feeds grew 3X over the same period.”
Looking ahead, he highlighted the transformative role of artificial intelligence in shaping the next phase of sports consumption.
“With the advancements in artificial intelligence, we have an opportunity to take a fundamental leap – from serving aggregate cohorts to individual personas, where each fan can watch live sports in a way that feels made just for them.”
On the innovation front, Chatterjee detailed how JioStar is integrating AI and commerce into its platform to create seamless user experiences.
“We have embedded multilingual conversational AI and voice search into the heart of how fans watch sport. A fan in Lucknow can ask, in Hindi, “What is Dhoni’s strike rate in finals?” and get an answer in seconds, without ever leaving the stream. No switching apps or searching, just by asking, in the language you think in. Through our integration with Swiggy, viewers can now order food within the JioHotstar app, moving from intent to transaction without breaking the viewing experience. We see this as an early signal of what a truly integrated sports platform can look like.”
He concluded by emphasising the need for industry-wide collaboration to build next-generation sports experiences at scale.
“If you want to understand where sports broadcasting is going, look at India. Not as a market of the future, but as one that is already defining it.”
