As the Indian Premier League (IPL) draws to a close, JioHotstar is leaning on a bouquet of offerings—for viewers and advertisers alike—to retain the swell of traffic it gets during the marquee cricket tournament.
JioStar’s chief product officer Bharath Ram told Mint in an exclusive interview that the streaming platform is betting on a suite of interactive features, including ChatGPT-powered search, new consumer offerings such as the microdrama platform Tadka, and a newly launched self-serve platform for small and medium advertisers to retain the IPL momentum.
“How do we retain [viewers] for the rest of the year is pretty much what I’ve been thinking about,” Ram said. “For the past two months I’ve spent one minute thinking about the IPL and 99% [of my time] thinking about how I can get them to come back and watch Big Boss.”
The reality TV show is JioHotstar’s most popular offering outside of cricket. Although this year’s dates for Bigg Boss are yet to be announced, last year it began airing in August. This leaves JioHotstar to manage a two-month lull by retaining the subscribers and advertisers it won during .
AI search
Earlier this year, JioHotstar began launching a number of features to increase viewer engagement. The biggest of these was a search feature powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT that allows viewers to search through the platform’s catalogue of shows and films using conversational hooks, such as a viewer’s mood, situation, or any other emotional factor.
JioHotstar is hoping to use this feature to reel in advertisers as well. “We are the first platform to actually personalize ads on a one-to-one basis like an individual,” Ram said. “It’s called ‘n=1’ advertising. We use a lot of information to personalize ads to match the consumer and the ad,” he said. His team is working on encoding more complex viewer preferences into attributes that advertisers on the platform can target, he added. However, Ram declined to share how many of JioHotstar’s 451 million monthly active users have used this feature.
But because of the IPL’s importance, the platform had stopped shipping any new code a month before the tournament began, Ram said. “The entire month [preceding the IPL] was just capacity planning and scale testing and functional testing,” he added.
Microdrama bet
In early April, JioHotstar launched a microdrama platform called Tadka, with over 100 titles. After an initial debate on whether the platform should be part of JioHotstar or a separate offering, the company eventually launched it as a separate tab within the JioHotstar app.
Ram, who has previously worked at Flipkart, Instagram, and Amazon Prime Video in the US, said he wanted microdramas to remain an in-app offering as it is much easier to capture a user’s attention inside an app they already use every day than convince them to download a new app.
Since launching Tadka during the IPL, JioHotstar has been experimenting with nudges to get users to try it out, including immersing some viewers in an episode of a microdrama show right away, Ram said. However, he declined to share how many people were using the Tadka tab.
Several microdrama apps have cropped up in India of late, including Kuku TV, Pocket TV, and Story TV. Older social media firms such as Sharechat have also pivoted to this model. Larger streaming rivals are betting on it too: Zee Entertainment’s Zee5 invested an undisclosed sum in microdrama app Bullet last June, and music and entertainment firm Saregama is producing microdramas through its digital arm FilterCopy.
The microdrama business has grown to $1.5 billion this year and could be worth $4.5 billion n 2030, according to a March report by venture capital firm Lumikai.
Self-service for advertisers
JioHotstar is also working on wooing small and medium enterprise (SME) advertisers. It launched a self-serve ads portal during the IPL last month, allowing advertisers to run campaigns for as little as ₹50,000.
SME advertisers rely heavily on self-serve digital advertising services from Big Tech firms such as Meta, Google, and Amazon. These require relatively small investments and campaigns can be managed end-to-end without the need of an account manager or ad sales executive. JioHotstar is the first major Indian streaming app to launch a self-serve platform.
“The people we have hired have built large self-serve platforms in the past,” Ram said. “Building an ad auction system is actually very complex. We have several hundred adopting this, and they are spending lakhs per campaign,” he added. He declined to share exactly how many advertisers were using the self-serve platform.
JioHostar also launched a ‘commerce at scale’ offering, which allows advertisers to drive sales directly through the JioHotstar app. During the IPL, for instance, Swiggy ran ads that allowed viewers to order food directly through the JioHostar app. The platform had piloted similar ads by quick commerce fashion platform Newme during the last season of reality TV show Splitsvilla earlier this year, Ram said.
Why SMEs are crucial
The IPL had a relatively lean season this year as ad volumes on television grew only 2% year-on-year, according to data from industry research body TAM (as of 13 May, the latest available third-party data). However, the IPL season opened with a 10% jump in ad volumes in early April, TAM said in a previous report, led by an advertising blitz by Google for its AI offerings. Besides, JioHotstar said in a press statement that the IPL had a “combined reach” of 1.1 billion views this season, with digital reach up 15% year-on-year, and connected-TV reach up 25%.
SMEs are a crucial part of digital ad volumes in India. While digital media is expected to clock 14% compound annual growth to reach ₹1.64 trillion by 2028, SME advertising is expected to grow at 16%, according to a March report by consulting firm EY and industry body Ficci.
“With SME advertisers spending ₹363 billion on digital media, cracking the SME advertising base will be essential for profitability and growth,” the report said. “We expect to see SME platforms and/or integrations between and large SME communities or commerce marketplaces to target this audience segment.”