Reliance Industries Ltd., Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd. and The Walt Disney have announced the completion of the merger between Viacom18’s media and JioCinema businesses with Star India Pvt. Ltd.
RIL has invested Rs. 11,500 crore into the joint venture, valuing it at Rs. 70,352 crore on a post-money basis.
The much awaited joint venture between Reliance Industries Ltd.’s Viacom18 and Disney’s Star India has been completed and it became effective from November 14, 2024. The companies announced that the JV has been approved by the NCLT, Competition Commission of India and other regulatory bodies.
The new Star India will be led by Kevin Vaz, Kiran Mani and Sanjog Gupta. Rasesh Upadhyay will work directly with Kevin to drive entertainment business strategy and operations.
Star India has since announced division heads post-merger.
As per the new structure, Piyush Goyal will be the Head of TV Distribution. Sumit Grover will helm Cable, DTH & Growth. Amit Shah will be in charge of the Linear TV Distribution Strategy and partnering with the Sports Strategy team. Bindu Nair has been entrusted with Distribution Marketing. Ajit Varghese will be the Head of Revenue, Entertainment & International. Under him, Mahesh Shetty will head LCS client engagement and cross-screen leverage. Dhruv Dhawan, Shubra Sethi, Kingshuk Mitra and Sudhir Nagpal are the other members in Varghese’s team.
Alok Jain has been named Head of Cluster, Entertainment (Colors, Digital Hindi, Niche, Movies and Studios).
Krishnan Kutty has been appointed Head of Cluster, Entertainment (South).
Sumanta Bose will be the Head of Cluster, Entertainment (Star Plus and Bharat, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati).
The merger of the media and JioCinema businesses of Viacom18 into Star India Pvt. Ltd. became effective on November 14.
The JV has allotted shares to Viacom18 and RIL as consideration for the assets and cash, respectively.
At the closing of the transactions noted above, the JV is controlled by RIL and owned 16.34% by RIL, 46.82% by Viacom18 and 36.84% by Disney.
Nita M. Ambani will be the chairperson of the JV, with Uday Shankar as vice chairman providing strategic guidance to the JV.
The JV is home to the most iconic and engaging media brands in India across TV and digital platforms. The combination of Star and Colors on the television side, and JioCinema and Hotstar on the digital front will provide extensive choice of content across entertainment and sports to viewers in India and globally.
The formation of the JV will herald a new era in India’s entertainment industry for consumers. This unique joint venture of Reliance and Disney brings together the companies’ content creation and curation prowess, world-class digital streaming capabilities along with a digital first approach that will help the JV deliver unparallelled content choices at affordable prices to Indian viewers and the Indian diaspora globally.
The JV will be one of the largest media and entertainment companies in India with pro forma combined revenue of approximately Rs. 26,000 crore for the fiscal year ended March 2024. The JV operates over 100 TV channels and produces 30,000+ hours of TV entertainment content annually. The JioCinema and Hotstar digital platforms have an aggregate subscription base of over 50 million. The JV holds a portfolio of sports rights across cricket, football and other sports.
