JioHotstar says voice search overtakes text in discovery

More than 60% of users choose voice over text in JioHotstar's conversational discovery feature, developed with OpenAI.

The update came as JioStar executives outlined how the streaming service is trying to change viewing habits across mobile and connected television, using artificial intelligence to reshape how audiences find programmes and interact with content.

Reaching 500 million monthly active users, JioHotstar is positioning conversational search as a response to the growing size of streaming libraries and the difficulty viewers face in navigating them. The system combines natural language interaction with visual recommendations, allowing users to search by speaking rather than typing.

Vijay Seshadri, chief architect at JioStar, said the wider market had seen little real change in this area for years. "Nothing much has changed in content discovery in the last 15 to 20 years," he said. "Conversational discovery, where users switch from typing phrases to having conversations with their systems, is a very key paradigm shift."

JioStar is also betting that connected televisions will become a larger part of its viewing base. Bharath Ram, chief product officer at JioStar, said there are close to 100 million connected TVs in the market, giving the service room to build stronger engagement beyond smartphones.

That shift matters for a platform serving a broad Indian audience, from mobile-first users and connected TV households to paying subscribers. Rather than building entirely separate products for each group, JioStar is looking for common user behaviour while adjusting experiences where needed.

Ram said product choices start with the audience rather than technical design. "A lot of product vision starts backwards from the consumer experience," he said. "The sooner you can remove yourself out of the way and give consumers the content they want to watch and the experiences they want to go through, the retention cycle kicks in automatically."

CTV push

Connected TV adoption got a lift during the latest Indian Premier League season, as some mobile-led users moved to larger screens. JioHotstar sees that trend as a chance to increase viewing frequency across devices rather than treat television and mobile as separate markets.

Behind that consumer strategy is a large engineering operation. Seshadri said the platform has to absorb heavy surges during major live events, including millions of concurrent interactions and sharp increases in subscriptions.

At peak moments, the system has handled nearly 5 million subscription requests a minute. The challenge for the engineering team is to keep the service stable during those spikes without disrupting the viewing experience.

Commerce link

JioStar is also trying to use AI beyond search. Ram described JAMS, the company's video intelligence layer, as a way to make scenes machine-readable so the platform can identify people, products and objects within content.

That could create a closer link between what viewers watch and what they might buy. Ram said the more precisely the service understands on-screen elements, the narrower the gap becomes between entertainment and shopping.

"If you truly start peeling the layers of the onion and understanding what the items within a piece of content are, the separation between content and commerce starts thinning," Ram said.

JioStar pointed to interactive features and tie-ups such as Jeeto Dhan Dhana Dhan and its integration with Swiggy as examples of audiences doing more than simply watching live programming. The aim is to make streaming a more participatory experience, with commerce as one possible extension of that behaviour.

Seshadri said the implications could extend beyond programme discovery. "The next sector to be disrupted is product commerce," he said. "A platform like ours that can crack a seamless purchasing experience while watching content could see a transformative change over the next 12 months."

JioHotstar has a library of more than 300,000 hours of programming across 19 languages, spanning films, original series, live sport, live events, anime, children's programming and television channels from the JioStar network. That scale helps explain why discovery tools and interface design are becoming central to the company's strategy as competition in streaming moves beyond the size of content catalogues.