18 - 06 - 2026

JioHotstar pushes conversational AI for streaming discovery

JioHotstar, a streaming services provider, is focusing on conversational discovery, interactive features, and commerce integration to drive engagement among its user’s base.

“A lot of product vision starts with the consumer experience and works backwards from it. In a consumer internet platform, you’re constantly thinking about the consumer lifecycle – how you acquire users, how you retain them, and how you create value for them over time. Every product decision ultimately has to balance what the consumer wants with what’s technically feasible and commercially sustainable, and that’s where product and engineering come together,” Bharath Ram, Chief Product Officer at JioStar said.

With about 100 million CTVs in the market, the platform is focused on driving engagement that extends across screens. Bharath Ram noted that the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2026 season helped move mobile-first audiences toward CTV experiences. The platform’s conversational discovery experience has been seeing 60 per cent of users choose voice over text, while Indian Premier League 2026 drove increased adoption of Connected TV, with mobile-first audiences upgrading their viewing experience.

“Product and engineering play complementary roles. Product defines the ‘what’ by grounding decisions in customer problems, while engineering focuses on the ‘how’ by building solutions at scale. But on a platform like JioHotstar, it’s a highly iterative process because factors like availability, scale and cost efficiency continuously influence product design. Engineering doesn’t just execute the vision; it helps shape the capabilities that make that vision possible,” Vijay Seshadri, Chief Architect at JioStar said.

JioStar executives Bharath Ram and Vijay Seshadri were speaking in a session titled India Streaming: The Product View, at the Asia Pacific Video Operators Summit (APOS) 2026.

Seshadri highlighted the engineering requirements for operating at scale, including managing millions of concurrent interactions and handling subscription spikes during live events. He noted the platform handles about 5 million subscription requests per minute. He also stated that the volume of available content has grown, but discovery mechanisms have not evolved for years.

JioHotstar’s conversational discovery experience, developed with OpenAI, is seeing adoption with more than 60 per cent of users choosing voice over text. Additionally, Bharath Ram discussed JAMS, a video intelligence layer that makes content machine-readable by identifying people, products, and objects within scenes.

“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,” Ram said.

The platform is also integrating interactive experiences, citing Jeeto Dhan Dhana Dhan and an integration with Swiggy as examples of audiences engaging with live content.

“The next sector to be disrupted is product commerce,” Seshadri 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.”

JioHotstar has 500 million monthly active users and a library of more than 300,000 hours of programming, and its services are available in 19 languages.