"Most media companies haven’t changed at all": Uday Shankar calls for innovation in monetization, local content to unlock India’s M&E growth

On the third day of WAVES 2025, Uday Shankar, Vice Chairman of JioStar, in conversation with Media Partners Asia’s Vivek Couto, offered a candid take on India’s media and entertainment industry—urging bold innovation in content, monetization, and inclusivity to meet a rapidly evolving audience.

Shankar believes Indian media companies have reached an inflection point— where continued success demands transformation, not complacency.

“The notion of media company has changed. Unfortunately, most of the media companies haven’t changed,” Shankar said, highlighting that the twin pillars of monetization—advertising and subscription— have stagnated in the face of new digital competition and changing consumer behavior.

Shankar argued that while global players have seen ballooning valuations due to platform and product innovation, Indian firms must now go beyond their traditional playbooks. “There is pressure on the existing streams of revenue, and no new streams of revenue and income have come there,” he said. “We will have to innovate on the monetization model.”

According to Shankar, India’s $13 billion screen entertainment market is still vastly under-leveraged. He pointed out the dramatic rise of television and video consumption over the last 30 years, calling it “one of the most spectacular stories anywhere in the world.” He credited the explosion of domestic content and enterprise as the bedrock of the industry’s growth. “This whole thing was built on domestic enterprise, domestic creativity, and bulk of it was domestic capital,” he said.

For reference, he shared how JioStar is making a huge investment in India. "If memory serves me right, in 2024, the two companies spent Rs 25,000 crores on content alone. In 2025, that number went to Rs 30,000 crores, and the number next year will be over Rs 32,000- 33,000 crores. So in three years alone, we have spent more than $10 billion."

Subscription Models Need Innovation

Despite growth in streaming, Shankar said India’s media industry remains shackled by outdated revenue models. “There has been zero innovation almost in monetization models,” he said, drawing parallels to the newspaper industry of 70 years ago. “Even today, the latest media company is still doing subscription and advertising.”

He warned that without new monetization formats, the industry could miss out on full consumer potential—especially in a price-sensitive market. “You’ve not been able to identify or discover a new model of monetization… You need to innovate on product, you need to innovate on content formats, and then you need to introduce new models of making money so that the consumers feel value in paying more.”

In conclusion, Shankar called on Indian companies to step up as global leaders—not just in content creation, but also in business model reinvention. “There is a real opportunity for an Indian company to break through all of this and create globally a value that can be indexed globally,” he said. “But for that, we will have to innovate.”

He also pointed out that the M&E industry needs to get a more share of advertisers.

"By and large, we have limited ourselves to the same pool of advertisers that are there. I think there is a need to go deeper and create new brands because the economic activity has become highly decentralized and the value creation is happening not just in tier two cities and towns, it's it's gone down to tier three and tier four.

We need to find ways to make those economic activities, help them scale up, create bigger brands, expand their market, and participate in the value creation. If that happens, I don't see why this market cannot double in the next five years."

India’s Pay TV Isn’t Dead—It’s Growing

Refuting the popular narrative that pay TV is dying, Shankar pointed to the recent performance at Jiostar post-merger with Reliance and Disney. “We have changed the perception about pay TV. Pay TV has added numbers, not lost numbers, since we came together,” he said. The key, he explained, was rejecting imported pessimism and continuing to invest in distribution and local relevance. “We believe that India continues to be an exciting pay TV market and will continue to be so for a while.”

He added that the pay TV model’s success lies in maintaining price sensitivity: “If your ambition is to take it to 300 million or half a billion people, then you have to keep their affordability very front and center in your strategy.”

Bollywood Is “Frozen in Time”

Shankar didn’t mince words on the state of India’s film industry, especially the Hindi-speaking market.

“The Hindi film industry of Bollywood has a huge problem. It is still frozen in time in terms of the nature of the product that it creates,” he said. While Southern cinema—Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada has witnessed a creative resurgence, Bollywood has fallen behind its audience.

“That equation just doesn’t stack,” Shankar said, pointing to the industry’s age and access mismatch. “This is a country where 65% of the population is under 35 years of age and 90% of the talent in this industry is over 60 years of age. That is a clear mismatch.”

He also underscored structural issues like a lack of affordable theaters and over-curated access to new talent in the Bollywood industry. “The movie-going experience is really expensive… it leaves a hole in your pocket,” he said, while drawing parallels with the Southern Cinema market, where ticket prices are much cheaper.

The Road Ahead: Localized Content, Creative Infrastructure, and Inclusive Growth

For the next wave of growth, Shankar stressed deeper distribution, India-centric storytelling, and a complete overhaul in creative infrastructure. “You cannot cater to the needs of this country on 700, 750 million people who are watching content every day, and the same small universe of providers continues to churn out the content.”

He noted a mismatch between the speed of consumer evolution and the industry's ability to keep up. “I often feel that the consumers in this country are way ahead of where the producers are and that gap needs to be bridged.”

Uday believes that when it comes to innovation, media companies may be lagging, but regulators are even further behind.

"You keep hearing the conversations about all screens should be treated alike. No, you cannot do that, you will kill the value in both businesses," he cautions.

He drew a clear distinction between television and digital media, noting that TV is a shared, household subscription experience on a big screen, while digital content is consumed on private, personal screens. According to him, both mediums serve different purposes and are at distinct stages of maturity — television being mature and more established, while digital is still emerging. "And you need to leave them free to compete if you need to support where it is required. But to homogenize everything will mean that you are homogeneously destroying value from both," he warns.