Bharath Ram – Chief Product Officer, JioStar and Vijay Seshadri – Chief Architect, JioStar discussed how consumer-first design, AI-powered discovery and interactive experiences are creating richer entertainment experiences
· JioHotstar’s conversational discovery experience is seeing over 60% of users choose voice over text
· With close to 100 million Connected TVs in the market, the platform is focused on driving deeper engagement and viewing frequency across devices.
· IPL 2026 drove increased adoption of Connected TV, with mobile-first audiences upgrading their viewing experience.
· AI-powered capabilities such as JAMS and interactive experiences are creating new opportunities across discovery, participation and commerce.
At APOS 2026, Bharath Ram, Chief Product Officer, JioStar, and Vijay Seshadri, Chief Architect, JioStar, shared how JioHotstar is building its product and engineering capabilities to serve one of the world’s largest streaming audiences. Speaking in a session titled India Streaming: The Product View, the two leaders discussed how consumer-first product design, artificial intelligence and engineering at scale are coming together to create richer entertainment experiences. In conversation with Vivek Couto, CEO, Media Partners Asia, Bharath and Vijay reflected on the changing nature of streaming, where the focus is increasingly expanding beyond content availability to improving discovery, enabling deeper engagement and creating seamless consumer journeys across devices and formats.
Speaking about building for one of the world’s largest streaming audiences, Bharath opened the discussion by talking about building for India’s diverse consumer base, where audiences span mobile-first users, Connected TV households and premium subscribers. Rather than creating separate products for different segments, he explained that the focus is on understanding common consumer behaviours while creating differentiated experiences where needed.
“A lot of product vision starts backwards from the consumer experience,” Bharath said. “The sooner you can remove yourself out of the way and give consumers the content they want to watch and the experiences they want to go through, the retention cycle kicks in automatically.”
Speaking about the evolving Connected TV ecosystem, Bharath also noted that with close to 100 million Connected TVs already in the market, the opportunity is increasingly about driving engagement and creating viewing habits that extend across screens. He pointed to the IPL season as an example of how JioHotstar has been able to encourage mobile-first audiences to explore Connected TV experiences.
Adding to this, Vijay reflected on the engineering complexity of operating at such scale, where product and technology must work in tandem to deliver seamless consumer experiences during peak demand. From managing millions of concurrent interactions to handling subscription spikes during marquee live events, touching nearly 5 million subscription requests per minute – the focus is on building resilient systems that can scale without compromising the user experience.
As streaming libraries continue to grow, the conversation turned to content discovery and the role of AI in simplifying the consumer journey. Vijay highlighted that while the volume of content available to audiences has increased exponentially, the mechanisms for discovering it have remained largely unchanged for years. “Nothing much has changed in content discovery in the last 15 to 20 years,” Vijay said. “Conversational discovery, where users switch from typing phrases to having conversations with their systems, is a very key paradigm shift.”
JioHotstar’s conversational discovery experience, developed in partnership with OpenAI, is already seeing encouraging consumer adoption, with more than 60% of users choosing voice over text when given the option. By combining natural language interactions with visual recommendations, the experience enables viewers to navigate content libraries in a more intuitive and personalised way.
Vijay also stated that while much of the industry’s focus has been on generative AI, an equally significant opportunity lies in deriving deeper intelligence from existing content libraries, making them more discoverable, contextual and interactive. Building on this, Bharath discussed JAMS, JioHotstar’s video intelligence layer, which makes content machine-readable and creates a richer understanding of what’s happening within every scene.
“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. By understanding the people, products and objects within content, AI can enable more contextual consumer experiences, where discovery, engagement and commerce become a seamless extension of the viewing journey.
Building on the idea of creating richer consumer interactions, Bharath also spoke about the role of interactive experiences in shaping new viewing behaviours. He highlighted Jeeto Dhan Dhana Dhan and JioHotstar’s integration with Swiggy as examples of how audiences are increasingly engaging with live content beyond passive viewing. Vijay further added that many of the capabilities being developed around conversational interfaces and AI have applications beyond content discovery, creating opportunities to simplify and enrich commerce experiences as well.
“The next sector to be disrupted is product commerce,” Vijay said. “A platform like ours that can crack a seamless purchasing experience while watching content could see a transformative change over the next 12 months.”
From conversational interfaces and Connected TV experiences to contextual commerce and interactive engagement, the discussion reflected the platform’s continued focus on creating seamless consumer experiences across a rapidly evolving streaming ecosystem.