Speaking during the APOS conference’s “India Streaming: The Product View” session, JioStar executives Bharath Ram and Vijay Seshadri outlined how JioHotstar is building its product and engineering roadmap around consumer behavior, artificial intelligence and connected television.

For Bharath Ram, chief product officer of JioStar, product development begins with understanding India’s highly diverse audience base, which spans mobile-first viewers, connected TV households and premium subscribers.

“A lot of product vision starts backwards from the consumer experience,” Ram 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.”

Rather than creating separate products for different audiences, JioHotstar aims to identify common viewing behaviors while tailoring experiences where necessary. Ram noted that mobile-first users represent an active acquisition target for connected TV, with the platform using the IPL 2026 cricket tournament to accelerate that upgrade journey. “During IPL, we specifically increased a lot of mobile people to consider Connected TV,” he said.

The platform is betting heavily on Connected TV. With nearly 100 million connected televisions now in the Indian market, Ram said the focus has shifted toward increasing engagement and building viewing habits across multiple screens.

Seshadri, JioStar’s chief architect, highlighted the growing role of AI in simplifying content discovery. “Nothing much has changed in content discovery in the last 15 to 20 years,” he said. “Conversational discovery, where users switch from typing phrases to having conversations with their systems, is a very key paradigm shift.” Developed in partnership with OpenAI, JioHotstar’s conversational search experience is already seeing more than 60% of users choose voice interactions over traditional text-based searches. Seshadri added that the interface fuses imagery and voice into a single conversation, allowing users to start with a broad request – such as finding something to watch with family on a Friday evening – and narrow it down to a specific, personalized recommendation.

The executives also revealed how AI is being deployed beyond recommendation systems. Through JAMS, JioHotstar’s video intelligence layer, the company is making content machine-readable, enabling deeper understanding of characters, products and objects appearing within a scene. Seshadri described the capability as part of what he called a “derivative layer” of AI – distinct from generative applications – that unlocks semantic search, deeper audience experiences and new commerce opportunities from the platform’s existing library.

According to Ram, that capability could fundamentally reshape the relationship between entertainment and commerce. “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,” he said. He pointed to the platform’s “Jeeto Dhandana Dhan” game, which runs alongside live cricket, and its integration with Swiggy as proof that audiences are already comfortable leaning forward and interacting with content – a behavioral foundation that Ram said can be extended to transactional commerce.

Seshadri agreed, identifying product commerce as the next major area of disruption. “A platform like ours that can crack a seamless purchasing experience while watching content could see a transformative change over the next 12 months,” he said.

On the engineering side, Seshadri gave a sense of the scale involved, noting that during IPL the platform handled peak subscription rates of more than 5 million requests per minute, requiring systems specifically designed to spread load across the predominantly UPI-based Indian payment ecosystem without disrupting the user experience.

The session was moderated by Vivek Couto, CEO of Media Partners Asia, which produces APOS.