‘Dhurandhar,’ IPL Power India’s Reliance Industries’ Media Business to $3.7 Billion Revenue

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- Reliance Industries' media and entertainment business generated $3.7B in revenue for FY26, with EBITDA of $616M and net profit of $362M
- JioStar held 34.7% of India's TV viewership with 389M daily viewers, while JioHotstar averaged 451M monthly active users
- JioHotstar became the first Indian paid streaming platform to cross 1B downloads and is now available on 99% of connected TVs in India
- Live cricket powered streaming records: 72.5M concurrent viewers during the T20 World Cup, with IPL 2026 drawing 700M+ viewers across the season
- Jio Studios' 'Dhurandhar' franchise crossed $318M in worldwide box office, becoming the first Indian duology where each installment individually surpassed $105M
- JioHotstar launched its Tadka short-form hub in April 2026 (reaching 100M users in two months) and debuted a Swiggy food-ordering integration inside live IPL streams
- JioStar unveiled JAMS, an AI-native content production pipeline, alongside ChatGPT-powered conversational content discovery supporting Indian accents and regional languages
Why it matters: Reliance's media empire generated $3.7B in FY26 revenue as live cricket (72.5M concurrent T20 World Cup viewers) and the $318M 'Dhurandhar' franchise delivered unprecedented streaming scale. The launch of JAMS AI studio and Swiggy in-stream commerce shows JioHotstar building beyond video into an integrated content-and-commerce platform competing for India's digital wallet.




