Bali: Speaking at APOS 2026, Asia’s premier summit for the entertainment and technology industry, Ishan Chatterjee, CEO, JioStar Sports, outlined how India has emerged as one of the world’s most dynamic live sports markets, powered by scale, personalization, multi-sport growth, commerce integration, and AI-led fan experiences.
Reflecting on the growing scale of sports consumption in India, Chatterjee highlighted the platform’s recent milestones and the evolving role of live sports in an increasingly fragmented content environment.
“We are now operating at an incredible scale within India. Just for some numbers, we are now regularly delivering over 1 billion viewers every IPL season. This season we got 1.2 billion. In the recently concluded ICC World Cup (ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 Final), we set the record for the highest concurrency globally for any single event at 72.5 million. But what I take away from that is that live sports, and specifically cricket, are unique. Today, we operate in a world where content supply across both traditional media and social media is infinite, and there are very few properties that can aggregate audiences at the scale that live sports can. If there’s an India-Pakistan game going on, if there’s an IPL final, you can be rest assured that hundreds of millions of people are going to tune in to watch that particular game, and it’s a core part of our strategy.”
He noted that serving more than a billion viewers requires designing experiences that account for vastly different consumption environments across the country.
“That one billion-plus viewership includes somebody sitting in South Mumbai watching on a connected TV, but it also includes somebody on a mobile phone in a village in India. A one-size-fits-all proposition doesn’t work for both.”
Highlighting how language personalization has become critical to growth, Chatterjee shared changing consumption patterns within India’s sports audience.
“On IPL, we had over 12 different languages fans could consume the property in, and we are now at a stage where English consumption of IPL is less than 10% of our watch time. 90% comes from Indian languages, and if you remove Hindi, the other regional languages grew twice as fast as the rest of the field. It gives you an idea of the personalisation that you need in order to succeed with the scale.”
Beyond cricket, Chatterjee pointed to the expansion of sports consumption across international properties and year-round programming.
“IPL is critical to our overall strategy, but it’s not the only acquisition engine that we have. We are at the stage on the platform where we have over 350 days of live sports across many different sports. The Premier League alone in India now has over 100 million viewers in the last season. Last year, Wimbledon saw 80% growth in digital reach. The US Open that followed straight after saw 75% growth in our overall reach. This is just an example of consumption in India across live sports really taking off.”
He also discussed JioStar’s efforts to build sports categories beyond cricket, citing Kabaddi as an example of long-term investment creating new fandom.
“For non-cricket sports, there is a huge upside in India, which is massively untapped. One of the things that we have as a platform is the cricket funnel that comes into experience the sport. We can help direct that toward other sports to drive sampling and, eventually, fandom there. A good example of that is Kabaddi. Last season, we drew well over 300 million viewers, and that property was built entirely by us over the last 10 years. It is now a completely unique in-stadium as well as broadcast experience. It proved that you could take this top-of-funnel audience that is coming to watch marquee sports, direct them to others, and see growth. Kabaddi has been very successful, and I think that proves there is a huge roadmap for many other sports as well.”
On commerce integration and user engagement, Chatterjee explained how JioStar is exploring native experiences through partnerships.
“In this world of so much content and so many competing priorities for your time, consumer attention spans are dropping dramatically. The more we can provide all-encompassing user experiences, the more you can drive engagement and stickiness on the platform. What we think we need to get right is the connection between the commerce category and the content that is playing. An IPL game typically runs between 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. or 10:30 p.m. — that is dinner time. We know there is a very natural user behaviour that when somebody is watching a game, they probably want to order some food and not spend time in the kitchen. The integration with Swiggy was a native integration into the app, which allowed a user to watch the game, buy and transact, complete their food delivery and track the delivery order all within the app, never leaving the screen altogether. We provide a top-of-funnel experience for Swiggy that is unmatched, and for us it opens up new monetisation streams.”
Discussing emerging technologies, Chatterjee highlighted the company’s collaboration with OpenAI and how AI could transform sports consumption.
“With OpenAI, it was the same insight that we were working through. We tried to figure out that there were two trends that we were noticing on the platform, and across the industry: first, hyper-localisation going much deeper into regional languages, and the second, voice preferred to typing, as an example. The OpenAI integration again is a deep product integration with our platform, which allows you not just to discover content using voice search, but more importantly, to go much deeper into the fan experience itself. So now you can watch IPL, and while you’re seeing Rajasthan Royals bat, you can say what was Vaibhav Suryavanshi’s strike rate in the last IPL to date, and then ChatGPT will deliver that answer to you to really bring you a much more in-depth consumer experience that we think is very differentiated from anyone else in the market and really goes to the core of what drives fandom. I think we are literally just scratching the surface because what we’ve basically done so far is improve the search and the content discovery experience. But as you look ahead, you can imagine this moving into an agentic kind of experience where you’re basically talking to your phone and getting back information, information retrieval becomes much more seamless, and that adds to the overall consumer experience that you’re seeing on the screen.”
Closing the discussion, Chatterjee spoke about evolving monetisation models and deeper audience engagement.
“We do a very good job today of delivering top-of-funnel, big branding campaigns, where you need national scale. But consumer attention spans have dropped dramatically over the last few years because of social media and so many competing priorities on people’s time that providing more engagement opportunities and personalising them to each viewer is the way to go.”
The discussion underscored how JioStar is positioning live sports as a gateway to broader entertainment, commerce, and AI-led experiences while expanding the definition of fan engagement in India.
