From cricket to Coldplay, one govt is redefining how India consumes stay leisure.
As India’s leisure panorama undergoes seismic shifts, few executives are positioned as strategically as Sanjog Gupta. One in all three CEOs at JioStar – alongside Kiran Mani (CEO – Digital) and Kevin Vaz (CEO – Broadcast Leisure) – Gupta oversees sports activities and stay experiences throughout a sprawling empire that features Star Sports activities on tv, JioHotstar on digital, ESPN Cricinfo, and the corporate’s league-owning companies Mashal (Professional Kabaddi League) and Soccer [soccer] Sports activities Growth Restricted.
With over 20 years in media and leisure, Gupta has emerged as one of many architects of India’s fashionable sports activities ecosystem. His fingerprints are on marquee cricket properties like ICC cricket World Cups and the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket match, home leagues just like the PKL and Indian Tremendous League, and world occasions together with the Premier League and Wimbledon.
However Gupta’s ambitions lengthen far past sports activities. In an interview with Selection, the chief outlined his imaginative and prescient for remodeling JioStar right into a platform that delivers what he calls “infinite, hyper-personalized journeys” – a method that marries sports activities aggregation with stay cultural experiences starting from Coldplay concert events to non secular celebrations.
Gupta’s strategy to content material funding rests on what he calls foundational rules that inform each resolution at JioStar. “Reside sport in India is an aggregator of audiences like no different, so it serves as an enormous recruitment funnel for the platform,” he explains. This viewers aggregation creates what Gupta describes as a community impact that advantages all content material on the platform.
The second ingredient of his thesis anticipates huge development in India’s sports activities adoption. “A rustic of greater than a billion individuals shall be adopting sports activities each at a scale we’ve by no means seen earlier than, and with a range that we’ve by no means seen earlier than,” Gupta says, citing socioeconomic elements together with rising middle-class mobility, elevated well being consciousness amongst dad and mom, authorities recognition of sports activities’ smooth energy, and increasing non-public funding in leagues and infrastructure.
Maybe most crucially, Gupta emphasizes the distinctive monetization potential of sports activities followers. “The lifetime worth of a sports activities fan is sort of vital for a platform,” he notes, describing a shopper journey that progresses from consideration to ardour to affiliation to motion – the ultimate stage encompassing merchandising, sports activities journey, and stadium attendance.
This funding philosophy not too long ago translated into a considerable dedication. Gupta revealed that JioStar is investing $500 million throughout manufacturing, advertising, and know-how to boost its sports activities choices. “Our journey truly begins at that time [of rights acquisition] to develop followers for the property, to deepen fandom for that property, and to have the ability to extract disproportionate worth from that property,” he explains.
In 2022, the IPL rights have been purchased for $6.2 billion by the 2 entities who have since merged to kind JioStar. The match serves as Gupta’s laboratory for testing broader platform methods. The 2025 season delivered unprecedented numbers: 1.19 billion complete attain (537 million on TV and 652 million on digital), representing the most important attain ever for IPL on the JioStar community. The match drove JioHotstar to 300 million subscribers, with 55.2 million peak concurrency and 840 billion minutes of complete watch-time. Notably, 47% of IPL viewers on Star Sports activities have been ladies, whereas the IPL closing alone attracted 426 million viewers.
The match’s success creates momentum that advantages different content material in what he calls “the shadow of a giant, scaled aggregative occasion.” Following IPL’s conclusion, the World Take a look at Championship closing between South Africa and Australia turned “essentially the most watched non-India take a look at match on a digital platform ever,” whereas the primary take a look at of the England-India sequence achieved related milestones – each benefiting from IPL’s cross-promotional results.
Leisure content material receives related therapy. Gupta cites the strategic launch of “Prison Justice” throughout IPL’s closing weeks for example of leveraging sports activities site visitors for content material sampling. “We didn’t drop the complete present at one go, however truly staggered it beginning [during] the IPL,” permitting the sequence to construct an viewers that might return for episodes launched after the match concluded.
This strategy goals to create what Gupta phrases “intimate, infinite journeys” for every person. “For each person who’s touchdown on the platform, the journey needs to be distinct and distinctive,” he says. The purpose is a platform that feels “as aggregative and as scaled as it’s, however as intimate and private as we would like it to be for each person.”
The holy grail, in line with Gupta: “Least effort, most curiosity, intimate and personalised every time that she or he is logging on.”
Gupta’s mandate extends into stay experiences, a vertical that represents “the confluence of our experience in storytelling with our experience in serving stay scaled, aggregated audiences in sport.” The strategy targets customers’ twin needs for particular person expression and neighborhood belonging.
JioStar’s first main stay occasion – Coldplay’s Jan. 26 live performance on the Narendra Modi Stadium – was strategically chosen for its cultural significance. “We imagine that day, by advantage of being 26 January [India’s Republic Day], one of many largest bands on the planet acting at one of many largest stadiums on the planet would create what might be a cultural zeitgeist second,” Gupta explains.
The stay experiences technique encompasses each present occasions with scale potential and unique cultural programming. Following profitable non secular celebrations for Maha Shivaratri and Rama Navami (the latter that includes Indian cinema legend Amitabh Bachchan as narrator), Gupta sees vital alternative in India’s awakening live performance economic system.
“There’s a deep want to expertise, or make investments and spend on experiences that are actually as soon as in a lifetime,” he observes, noting each the experiential worth and the “FOMO facet” that drives viewers engagement.
Regardless of IPL’s combination success, Gupta acknowledges areas for enchancment. Regional language feeds within the Bhojpuri, Marathi, and Gujarati languages underperformed in comparison with Tamil and Telugu choices, largely attributable to discoverability points. “We weren’t capable of serve these feeds to customers who could have been thinking about them, as a result of we weren’t capable of make them discoverable sufficient on the platform,” he admits.
Equally, new product options together with 4 FAST channels designed for lean-back viewing on linked TVs failed to realize traction. These channels, organized by crew affiliation or themes like “shut finishes” and “basic video games,” suffered from the identical discoverability challenges.
“Whereas the aggregated expertise of the IPL delivered higher than anticipated numbers, there have been sure core constituent elements of that have which weren’t found by customers in any respect and are literally important for the long run development of the property,” Gupta displays.
Trying towards the subsequent 5 years, Gupta’s technique stays anchored in these funding rules. With the November 2024 “Assume Sports activities: Unlocking India’s $130B Sports activities Potential” report by Google and Deloitte projecting the Indian sports activities sector to succeed in $130 billion by 2030, JioStar will proceed investing in properties that function viewers aggregators, profit from India’s sporting development trajectory, and unlock the improved lifetime worth of sports activities followers.
The important thing metric stays easy: “Until such time as sports activities, sporting properties, sports activities rights, proceed to ship on these 4 tenets of the funding thesis, we’ll proceed to spend money on them.”
For stay experiences, Gupta guarantees continued concentrate on “moments of cultural zeitgeist” that provide each scale potential and “deep cultural significance.” Whether or not musical concert events or non secular celebrations, every occasion should fulfill twin standards of mass attraction and significant cultural resonance.
As Gupta places it, the mission stays “making India a sporting nation” whereas realizing his imaginative and prescient of “serving one fan as many sports activities experiences, powered by the interaction of know-how and creativity.”
In an business the place platform differentiation more and more is dependent upon personalization at scale, Gupta’s JioStar represents an enchanting take a look at case for whether or not sports activities can certainly function the final word viewers aggregator – and whether or not that aggregation can efficiently gas broader leisure ambitions throughout India’s huge, various market.
