At the APOS 2025 conference, JioStar CEO Sanjog Gupta gave an excellent masterclass on sports platform strategy. He showed how the Indian media juggernaut attained its lofty aim of drawing one billion viewers for the Indian Premier League cricket event and so changed the sports consumption scene in India.
According to CEO Sanjog Gupta, the amazing achievement of the platform during the session was a Sports Transformation, which he described through words like Velocity, Value and Impact in India. It was towards a major change from conventional content-focused strategies to what he termed “user-first design principles.”
Gupta told the audience, “Every fan at different points of time and on different devices and in different modes of consumption, will consume your content differently.” Get these free live streaming apps to watch IPL 2025 highlights and relive the victory moments.
This deliberate turn of events has produced very good results. Gupta also highlighted that the billion-viewer objective for the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025 was not the only achievement, but JioStar also emerged as the most monetized edition of a sports event in India. This was in terms of getting advertisements and subscription sales.
The hybrid subscription structure of the platform was crucial to this success. Rather than using a traditional paywall, JioStar lets consumers explore content without charge before moving them into paid subscriptions. This strategy greatly increased subscriber counts, reaching almost 280 million paid members during the IPL season, which Gupta dubbed “a tectonic shift in the paying population in India.”
Gupta pointed out that the investment approach of JioStar surpasses just purchasing rights by using marketing, production, and technology development, independent of rights fees, $500 million over the past fifteen years to enhance sports assets. The two companies that have recently been part of creating JioStar have invested a huge amount of $6.2 billion for the rights of the Indian Premier League (IPL) from 2022.
