In February this year, Reliance and Walt Disney’s media assets in India, Viacom 18 and Star India, respectively, merged in a major deal worth $8.5 billion in the Indian OTT space. After this merger, it was announced that Disney’s Indian OTT platform, Disney+ Hotstar, would be merged into Reliance’s Jio Cinema.
However, according to the latest reports, the Ambani family’s Reliance decided to keep Hotstar as its primary streaming platform by merging Jio Cinema into it. This merger would create a consolidated single OTT platform for the combined entity. As per the report, this combined OTT platform will be called as “Jio Hotstar”.
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As per reports, the Ambanis decided to merge Jio Cinema into Hotstar due to the latter’s superior technological infrastructure. Initially, it was reported that only sport-related content, like the Indian Premier League (IPL), would be shifted to Hotstar but the latest reports say that the two platforms will be completely merged into one.
Once Jio Cinema is merged with Hotstar, the latter will become the biggest OTT platform in the country with a wide subscription base. With Jio offering free OTT services with certain mobile and Wifi plans, Jio Hotstar is expected to dominate the Indian streaming space.
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