The Economic Times (India)
JioStar taps AI for shopping, TV movie ideas
JioStar is betting that conversations with viewers powered by generative AI will become a powerful tool for the streaming TV company.The unit of Reliance Industries Ltd., which boasts 500 million monthly users, is using OpenAI’s technology to move beyond traditional recommendations, envisioning an AI-powered platform where conversations help users discover shows, buy products and eventually influence what gets made.Executives say the same conversational interface that recommends movies from a library of over 300,000 hours of programming could become a real-time signal of audience demand, shortening the feedback loop between what viewers want and what studios produce.“The future is conversational search,” Bharath Ram, JioStar’s chief product officer, said in an interview. “Interesting search results lead people to watch content they otherwise wouldn’t have watched, increasing engagement, watch time and our ability to monetize.”Also read | Netflix to widen India content play with four weekly launches, creator-led showsThe strategy reflects a broader shift as streaming platforms look for new ways to drive engagement and revenue with generative AI. Netflix Inc. has focused on conversational recommendations, while YouTube, TikTok and Amazon. com Inc. have integrated commerce into their platforms. JioStar’s ambition is to combine those models by using AI conversations as both a recommendation engine and a source of consumer-intent data, creating a feedback loop that could support shopping, advertising and, ultimately, decisions about what content to commission.JioStar is India’s largest media company formed by the merger of Reliance Industries’ Viacom18 and Walt Disney Co.’s India operation. The corporate entity operates over 100 TV channels and oversees JioHotstar, which is the unified streaming platform that combined JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar.The streaming service rolled out OpenAI-powered conversational search earlier this year. Instead of typing keywords, viewers can describe their mood, ask for recommendations for a date night or simply tell the app they have 45 minutes to watch something. More than 60% of users choosing the feature now speak rather than type, according to Chief Architect Vijay Seshadri. And those conversations provide something conventional search cannot.Also read | Star Plus bets big on premium non-fiction as broadcasters chase new audiences, advertiser interest“One of the problems in current discovery with all this excess production of content is the fact that I don’t know what I want,” Seshadri said. “We think that a conversation or voice interface is actually going to be a game-changing way to discover content.”JioStar sees those conversations extending well beyond entertainment. The company recently integrated food delivery into its streaming platform through a partnership with food delivery company Swiggy, allowing users across around 690 cities watching cricket games or blockbuster movie releases to order meals without leaving the app. It has also experimented with letting viewers purchase clothing featured on MTV reality show Splitsvilla.Ram described those initiatives as the first step toward “content commerce.” Eventually, viewers could ask where to buy a jacket worn by a character or order a cricket team’s jersey while watching an Indian Premier League match using the same conversational interface, he said.“It’s not there yet, but that’s where it’ll naturally come,” Ram said. “We hope people get comfortable purchasing something within the JioHotstar app. There is a good case to make that this is how performance advertising is going to evolve into the future.”Turning JioHotstar app as a commerce platform may strengthen Reliance’s broader consumer ecosystem in India, where the e-commerce market is set to reach $250 billion by 2030. The screen economy and the retail economy are merging into a “single economy,” said Vivek Couto, chief executive officer at the research firm Media Partners Asia.Microdramas could become one of the first formats to capitalize on those audience insights. JioHotstar has already launched Tadka, a vertical-video destination featuring episodes under two minutes that has attracted about 100 million monthly active users, giving the company a testing ground for stories inspired by emerging viewer demand before expanding into longer-form programming.To prepare for that future, JioStar is building an AI studio in India. JioStar said the studio is designed to produce far more than microdramas. It is developing production workflows that combine text, image, audio and video models from multiple AI providers, with OpenAI supplying conversational search as well as text and voice capabilities.“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,” said Stephan Bugaj, senior vice president of GenAI content and technology, who leads JioStar’s AI studio. “We’re not just trying to turn on a big siphon and spray out AI slop all over our platform.”The goal, he said, is not simply to make production cheaper but to expand what Indian filmmakers can create. AI will help creators tell better stories rather than replace them.“The promise of the technology is to be able to do things that are spectacular at the level of a Star Wars or a Harry Potter at a budget that will allow us to still be profitable in India,” Bugaj said.
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