“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,” Chatterjee said at an industry event. “If there’s an India-Pakistan game or an IPL final, hundreds of millions of people are going to tune in.”
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The comments come as JioStar’s sports business scales rapidly. The company said IPL 2026 crossed 1.2 billion viewers, while JioHotstar recorded a global digital concurrency peak of 72.5 million viewers during the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 final.
Chatterjee said delivering sports to more than a billion viewers requires a highly personalised approach, with audiences consuming content across devices, geographies and languages. While IPL was available in more than 12 languages, English now accounts for less than 10% of total watch time, with regional-language consumption growing at twice the pace of the broader market.
Beyond cricket, he highlighted strong growth in global sports properties, noting that the Premier League attracted over 100 million viewers in India last season, while Wimbledon and the US Open recorded significant gains in digital reach.
“IPL is critical to our strategy, but it’s not the only acquisition engine,” he said. “We now have over 350 days of live sports on the platform.”Chatterjee also pointed to Kabaddi as evidence that India can build large-scale fandom around non-cricket sports. The league drew more than 300 million viewers last season, a property that JioStar and its predecessor entities have spent a decade nurturing.
On monetisation, he said integrations such as Swiggy‘s in-app commerce experience during IPL broadcasts are helping convert audience scale into new revenue streams, while the company’s partnership with OpenAI is aimed at creating deeper, AI-powered fan experiences that could eventually evolve into agentic, voice-led interactions.
“What we’ve done so far is improve search and content discovery. But we’re just scratching the surface,” Chatterjee said. “You can imagine an agentic experience where you’re talking to your phone and getting information seamlessly while watching the game.”