JioStar bets on AI chat to sell you shows, snacks and shopping

MUMBAI: Forget the algorithm quietly guessing what you want to watch. JioStar wants to ask you outright, then sell you a jacket while it’s at it.

The Reliance Industries-owned streaming behemoth, home to 500 million monthly users and a library stretching past 300,000 hours, is wiring OpenAI’s technology into JioHotstar to turn small talk into serious commerce. The pitch: let viewers describe a mood, a deadline or a date-night dilemma, and the app will not only serve up a film but eventually a shopping cart to match.

“The future is conversational search,” says Bharath Ram, JioStar’s chief product officer. Typed keywords, he argues, are a blunt instrument. A conversation, by contrast, nudges viewers towards content they would never have searched for, lifting engagement, watch time and, crucially, monetisation.

The numbers already back the theory. Since the voice-and-text search feature launched earlier this year, more than 60 per cent of users who try it choose to speak rather than type, according to chief architect Vijay Seshadri. The insight, he says, is less about search than self-knowledge: viewers drowning in content often “don’t know what they want” until a conversation draws it out of them.

JioStar is not stopping at recommendations. A tie-up with Swiggy already lets viewers in roughly 690 cities order food mid-match without leaving the app. Clothes worn on the reality show Splitsvilla have been made shoppable. Next on the wish list: buying a cricketer’s jersey mid-over, or a character’s jacket mid-scene, all through the same chat window. Ram calls it “content commerce” and a preview of where performance advertising is headed.

The stakes go beyond one app. India’s e-commerce market is projected to hit $250 billion by 2030, and JioStar, formed from the merger of Viacom18 and Disney’s India operations, is positioning JioHotstar as a front door to that spending. As Vivek Couto of Media Partners Asia puts it, the screen economy and the retail economy are fusing into one.

There is a production play too. JioHotstar’s microdrama arm, Tadka, already pulls in some 100 million monthly users with sub-two-minute episodes, a live laboratory for what audiences want before it is greenlit at scale. To feed that pipeline, JioStar is building an in-house AI studio blending text, image, audio and video models, with ambitions stretching well past bite-sized content.

“We’re not just doing microdramas with AI. We’re going to do daytime TV and primetime TV, premium and streaming feature films, ad films,” says Stephan Bugaj, the studio’s senior vice president of GenAI content and technology, batting away any suggestion of a slop factory. The aim, he insists, is Star Wars-grade spectacle on an Indian budget, without replacing the storytellers doing the telling.

Talk, it seems, is no longer cheap. At JioStar, it is about to become the whole business model.