By Patrick Frater: Befitting the media giant that he describes the one-year-old Indian media company as having become, JioStar group CEO Kevin Vaz delivered a simple, but powerful, presentation this morning ahead of tomorrow's opening of the three-day ATF market in Singapore.

Backed by Reliance Industries, India’s biggest corporation, JioStar was formed almost exactly a year ago from the merger of JioStar and the previous Disney properties of StarTV and Disney+ Hotstar. The result is a behemoth.

JioStar claims: a 35% share of India’s TV market, three times that of its nearest competitor; operation of more than 90 TV channels; and more than 760 million monthly active viewers. As an aggregator or curator of international media brands, JioStar hosts nearly all of Hollywood’s brands – HBO, Paramount, Peacock, Showtime, Disney – as well as BBC Studios.

In Vaz’s telling, this creates dynamics that are not available to smaller or more specialised players. “We are a country, a nation unto ourselves”, he said.

“Most apps chase one strategy: But with JioStar, a premium subscriber [in India] gets to see everything on one platform. We have all the Hollywood studios on one platform. No other platform in the world has negotiated this kind of access and combines that with our depth of Indian programming”, he continued.

Sports, in particular India’s national obsession, cricket, have brought huge numbers of eyeballs and helped power the other categories: JioStar claimed 61 million concurrent viewers in March, 300 million subscriptions in a single country and over 1 billion downloads of its app. (That figure exceeds the number of Indian TV households and roughly matches the number of smartphone registrations in India, meaning that JioStar connects with just about every Indian consumer.)

Vaz says the company has the potential to be nimble and globally influential. Examples include its combination of the two streaming apps – JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar – within three months of the formal corporate merger; viewer choices for sports watching that include multi-angle viewing, ‘herocam’ or individual player focuses as well as voice search and catchup functions; and massive support for new sports formats.

India’s Kabaddi field sport, Vaz said, is now the second most-watched sport in India, behind cricket and ahead of soccer. The near future, he said, will see the company reaching further into regional Indian languages, output via connected TV (already at 84 million devices), expansion into micro dramas and use of generative AI in production. “’The Mahabharat’ is our first AI-powered premium show in Hindi. It is in production and already on air,” Vaz said.