JioHotstar’s Product Playbook: AI Discovery, Connected TV and Commerce to Shape India’s Streaming Future
At APOS 2026, JioHotstar executives Bharath Ram and Vijay Seshadri explained how AI-led discovery, Connected TV growth, video intelligence and commerce could define the next phase of India’s streaming market.
At APOS 2026, JioHotstar offered a rare inside look at how India’s streaming future is being engineered. In a session titled “India Streaming: The Product View,” Bharath Ram, Chief Product Officer, and Vijay Seshadri, Chief Architect, spoke with Vivek Couto, CEO of Media Partners Asia, about what it takes to serve one of the world’s largest and most diverse streaming audiences.
Their message was clear: the next phase of streaming will not be won by content libraries alone. It will be shaped by how effortlessly users can discover, access, engage with, and even shop through content.
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Designing for a Massive and Diverse Audience
Bharath opened by describing the scale of the challenge. JioHotstar serves mobile-first users, Connected TV households, and premium subscribers three very different audiences with different habits.
Instead of building separate products for each group, the team focuses on understanding shared consumer behaviour first, then layering in differentiated experiences only where it matters.
"A lot of product vision starts backwards from the consumer experience," Bharath said. He explained that the platform's job is to get out of the user's way once people quickly reach the content and experience they want, retention follows naturally.
Connected TV Becomes the Next Growth Frontier
Bharath also flagged Connected TV as a major opportunity. With nearly 100 million Connected TVs already active in Indian homes, JioHotstar is now focused on turning casual viewing into lasting habits.
He pointed to the IPL season as a clear example the tournament successfully pushed many mobile-first viewers to try Connected TV for the first time.
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Engineering for Extreme Scale
Vijay then turned to the technical side. Running a platform at JioHotstar's scale means product and engineering teams must work in lockstep, especially during high-demand moments.
The numbers illustrate the pressure: during marquee live events, the platform handles nearly 5 million subscription requests every minute. To manage this, engineers build resilient systems designed to absorb massive spikes without degrading the viewing experience.
Why Content Discovery Needed a Reset
As streaming libraries have exploded in size, finding the right show has become harder, not easier. Vijay pointed out a surprising gap in the industry: "Nothing much has changed in content discovery in the last 15 to 20 years."
He believes the shift now underway is significant users are moving from typing search phrases to having actual conversations with their apps.
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JioHotstar has already built this conversational discovery feature in partnership with OpenAI, and early data backs up the bet: more than 60% of users choose voice over text when given the choice. The system blends natural language input with visual recommendations, helping viewers navigate large libraries more intuitively.
Turning Content Into Commerce
Beyond discovery, Vijay sees an underused opportunity in extracting deeper intelligence from existing content libraries making them more searchable, contextual, and interactive.
Bharath connected this to JAMS, JioHotstar's video intelligence layer, which makes every piece of content machine-readable. The system identifies people, products, and objects within scenes, effectively narrowing the gap between content and commerce.
"If you truly start peeling the layers of the onion and understanding what the items within a piece of content are, the separation between content and commerce starts thinning," Bharath said.
JioHotstar has already tested this idea through interactive formats like Jeeto Dhan Dhana Dhan and its integration with Swiggy, both of which push viewers from passive watching into active engagement.
What Comes Next
Vijay believes commerce is the next major disruption point for streaming. "A platform like ours that can crack a seamless purchasing experience while watching content could see a transformative change over the next 12 months," he said.
The discussion made it clear that JioHotstar is looking beyond the traditional streaming playbook. Its future roadmap is not limited to delivering content at scale; it is focused on building a more intelligent, interactive, and commerce-ready viewing ecosystem.
With Connected TV gaining momentum, conversational AI reshaping discovery, video intelligence making content machine-readable, and commerce moving closer to the viewing experience, JioHotstar is positioning itself at the centre of India’s next streaming shift.
For a market as vast and varied as India, the real battle may no longer be about who has the most content — but who can make that content the easiest to find, the most engaging to watch, and the most meaningful to act on.