Sales Manager

Indian streaming giant JioHotstar is betting big on Canada's South Asian diaspora. India's largest video streaming service, Jiostar, launched in Canada, promising to bring on a wider audience from the South Asian diaspora through enhanced interactive features. Jiostar's new subscriptions replace Hotstar that has served Canadian audiences since 2017. As of Sept. 2, Hotstar disappeared from Canada, the UK and Singapore and all three markets converted to the JioHotstar app and brand simultaneously. Existing subscribers were migrated automatically. What's new isn't the platform's presence here - it's what Canadian viewers can now do with it. Industry experts say JioStar's rebrand gives some Canadian viewers a more "formalized" way of accessing the platform, moving away from the informal downloads many relied on. The U.S. was not included in the launch. Hotstar once ran a standalone U.S. service, but in 2021, it was folded into Hulu and ESPN+. JioStar was created in November 2024 when Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries merged its media assets with Disney's India business in an $8.5-billion deal. Canadian subscribers now get Hindi television shows such as Anupama and Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai seven days ahead of their broadcast in India. They can also vote live on the Bigg Boss reality franchise across all six language editions, with a 24/7 live feed - access even the UK doesn't get. Pricing has changed too: Monthly plans are gone in Canada, replaced by quarterly ($19.99) and annual ($49.99) options. The UK service is allowing existing monthly subscribers to keep their plans until the auto-renewal lapses. The platform is owned by JioStar, the joint venture between Viacom18 and Disney India. Viacom18 is controlled by Reliance Industries, the conglomerate led by Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man. In a press release announcing the changes, Amit Malhotra, JioStar's Head of International Business, said the company wants to "reimagine how audiences experience entertainment," positioning the rebrand as more than cosmetic. It's a shift toward personalization, real-time engagement and a deeper content library, now topping 160,000 hours across 12 languages, according to the press release. The most recent Hindi season of Bigg Boss drew 133 million viewers, according to figures released by JioStar. Digital reach increased 30 per cent compared to the previous season and the grand finale peaked at 4.5 million concurrent viewers on the platform. JioHotstar is chasing a big audience in Canada too. According to the 2021 census, 2.57 million people in Canada identified as South Asian, making them the country's largest visible minority group. Of those, 1.35 million identified specifically as being of Indian origin. A bigger pipe, not a new one Faiza Hirji, a professor at McMaster University who has studied Bollywood's relationship with diaspora audiences for years, is skeptical that the platform has changed. "South Asians living in diaspora will find a way to access this kind of content because it is so important to them," Hirji said, pointing to the decades-old, often informal ways Canadian audiences have gotten their Bollywood fix - passing around videotapes, satellite dishes and unofficial set-top boxes. In Hirji's view, JioHotstar has made access to its content more formal and easier, rather than increasing the number of subscribers. According to Hirji, the channel's attraction isn't really about India at all. It's about recognition: Seeing people who look like them; hearing a familiar language; or catching a glimpse of rituals and music without ever having lived in the country. She traced back the industry's courtship of diaspora audiences roughly three decades, to films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, a story centred on Indian diaspora life in the UK and the longest-running film in Indian cinema history. The film is still screened daily at a Mumbai theatre 30 years after its release, which Hirji said marked a turning point where Bollywood could no longer ignore the affluent, growing audience living abroad. Interactive features such as live voting are simply the next step in that long trajectory, rather than a break from it, she said. Voting as a hook Toronto arts and culture reporter Aparita Bhandari, who co-hosts the Bollywood podcast, Khabardaar, sees the live-voting feature as a deliberate strategy rather than a gimmick. She said interactive participation is a way to expand the platform's audience base, drawing in viewers who might otherwise treat Bollywood content as background noise rather than appointment viewing. By Shilpashree Jagannathan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter Original Published on Sep 02, 2026 at 22:14 This item reprinted with permission from New Canadian Media Ottawa, Ontario

Om Pathre quits JioStar, joins Rusk Media as GM revenue management. After four years steering strategy at disney star and jiostar, the executive makes the leap into india's fast-growing digital content business 3 hours ago September 5, 2026 MUMBAI: Om Pathre has jumped ship, and the destination tells its own story. The executive has left JioStar, the broadcasting behemoth born of the Reliance-Disney merger, to become general manager, revenue management at Rusk Media, a firm planted firmly in the world of creators and digital content. The move, made in July 2026, marks a deliberate pivot away from legacy television and towards the messier, faster-moving business of new-age media. For nearly four years, Pathre was embedded deep in the machinery of Indian sports broadcasting. He joined Disney Star in August 2022 as part of the product and revenue strategy team for emerging sports, before moving into customer analytics for sports in August 2023. When Disney Star merged with Reliance's Viacom18 to form JioStar, Pathre transitioned smoothly, taking on the role of assistant manager, network strategy, insights and analytics for entertainment in August 2025, and was promoted to manager within four months. His work spanned consumer insights, strategy and monetization, giving him a ringside view of some of the thorniest problems in broadcasting economics, from audience measurement to sports rights monetisation. That pedigree makes his exit notable. Star Sports and JioStar Entertainment represent the old guard of Indian media: appointment viewing, cable bundles and cricket rights worth billions of rupees. Rusk Media represents the opposite bet, one on creators, short-form content and the algorithmic attention economy that has been quietly eating into broadcast television's share of eyeballs and ad budgets for years. Pathre himself is candid about the adjustment. A little over a month into the new role, he admits there has already been plenty to learn, and unlearn. That unlearning is the interesting bit. Revenue management in broadcasting relies on decades-old playbooks: rate cards, upfront deals, GRPs. Revenue management in the creator economy is a different animal altogether, built on brand deals, platform algorithms and audience data that shifts by the hour rather than the season. Getting one discipline to inform the other, without simply importing broadcast logic wholesale, will be the real test of this move. His career arc before JioStar also suggests a pattern of restlessness rather than drift. Pathre spent over three years at Shemaroo Entertainment, rising from management trainee to manager of content and programming strategy for its regional brand, Shemaroo MarathiBana, between 2019 and 2022. Earlier still, he cut his teeth in advertising and events, with stints at Triton Communications, McCann Worldgroup and a self-started venture, My Mithaiwala, where he handled marketing and brand-building from scratch. That entrepreneurial streak, paired with analytics chops honed at two of India's largest media houses, positions him well for a business like Rusk Media, where the lines between content, commerce and data are blurring fast. The broader signal here is one worth watching. As linear television's economics come under pressure from streaming and short-form platforms, talent that once built careers inside broadcast giants is increasingly flowing towards the creator economy instead. Pathre's move, from a company managing India's biggest sporting properties to one betting on the next generation of digital-first content, is a small but telling data point in that shift. Onwards and upwards, as he puts it, but in a distinctly different direction.