JioHotstar Goes Global: India’s Streaming Giant Launches in the UK, Canada, and Singapore

India’s Biggest Streaming Platform Steps Onto the World Stage

JioHotstar is no longer just India’s problem. The Reliance-controlled streamer, which has spent the past two years consolidating a grip on one of the world’s most crowded streaming markets, took its brand outside India for the first time this week. Starting September 2, JioHotstar has replaced Hotstar in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Singapore, flipping a regional heavyweight into an international player in a single move.

For viewers in those three markets, the change is front and center: the Hotstar app is gone, and the JioHotstar app has taken its place on the App Store, Google Play, and connected TVs. The reassuring part for existing subscribers is that their login credentials carry over, so nobody is starting their watch history from scratch.

160,000 Hours of Content — Without the Cricket

The headline number is the catalogue: more than 160,000 hours of entertainment, spanning Indian films, TV originals, reality shows, regional programming, non-fiction, kids’ content, and anime. It’s a library built for volume, and the company says it plans to add more than 30,000 hours of fresh content every year.

What’s missing, though, is the thing that made JioHotstar a household name back home: live sports. The international launch does not include the Indian Premier League, the Women’s Premier League, or national cricket matches — the events that help drive the platform’s claimed 500 million-plus monthly active users in India. JioStar says this is down to existing content deals and hasn’t ruled out adding sports down the line, but for now international viewers get a purely entertainment-focused service. If you want cricket in the UK, you’re still buying a separate subscription elsewhere.

That’s a real departure from the Indian product, which bundles cricket with the English Premier League, tennis majors like Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and domestic leagues for kabaddi and hockey. The overseas version is a more focused bet: Indian storytelling and programming, sold on the strength of its library rather than its scoreboard.

What’s Actually On the Service

The launch slate leans into the stuff global audiences already associate with Indian television. That means reality juggernaut Bigg Boss, arriving with a fresh interactive twist — for the first time, audiences in Singapore, Canada, and the UK can vote live across every edition, and Canadian and UK viewers get a 24/7 live feed. Canada even gets Bigg Boss Hindi a week ahead of its TV broadcast. There’s also India Ka Top 1 Percent, a new game show hosted by Anil Kapoor, rolling out to Canada and Singapore.

Beyond originals meant to break through internationally, the service pulls in linear channels under the Star banner — Star Plus, Colors, Star Vijay, Asianet, Star Jalsha, and Star Pravah — with early access to flagship soaps in Singapore and Canada and simultaneous broadcast in the UK. That linear-to-streaming mix is familiar territory for fans of Koffee with Karan, which has spent years bridging chat shows and primetime. Originals such as Criminal Justice, Asur, Aarya, and The Family Man sit alongside blockbuster movies including Chhichhore, 12th Fail, and Kill.

For viewers who want to go deeper than the launch originals, the wider library is where the platform shows its strength. Critically acclaimed Indian crime and drama series such as Mirzapur, Paatal Lok, and Delhi Crime have built international followings of their own, proving that language barriers rarely stop a good story.

The content comes in 12 languages, including English, Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, and Marathi, with dubs and subtitles across most of them. That emphasis on subtitles matters — it’s how a Hindi-language hit can travel to a Canadian household that doesn’t speak a word of it.

The Disney Story Behind the Rebrand

If the international push feels abrupt, the backstory explains it. In 2024, Reliance folded its media assets into a joint venture with Disney valued at around $8.5 billion. Under that deal, Hotstar and JioCinema merged into JioHotstar, and at the time the two services controlled roughly 85% of India’s streaming audience.

Disney had run Hotstar as an international product for years, including in the UK, Canada, and — until a 2021 shutdown — the United States. The global arm kept the Hotstar name and even borrowed Disney+’s look, but Disney+ later migrated most regions to its own unified app. So this week’s JioHotstar launch is also a reclamation of the brand: JioStar is leaning back into the Star lineage that Disney had largely phased out, reviving Star Plus, Star Gold, and Star Bharat for UK and European audiences as part of a broader relaunch.

The U.S. is not part of this launch wave. JioStar says it plans to expand into additional markets over time, and the company points to a target audience of more than 4 million South Asians spread across the three current launch countries — plus the wider diaspora drawn to Indian-language entertainment.

The launch lands at a moment when non-English storytelling has never travelled further. Global audiences have embraced subtitled hits for years, and the rising streaming competition has pushed every platform to chase viewers who want something beyond the same few franchises. Breakout shows from anywhere — South Korean thrillers, Spanish heists, Indian-origin comedy — have proven there is appetite for stories told beyond a single national audience. JioHotstar is betting it can tap that same appetite with a service built around it.

Pricing and What Comes Next

JioHotstar is introducing quarterly plans in all three markets for the first time, alongside annual subscriptions. The UK gets £19.99 per quarter or £69.99 annually; Canada offers CA$19.99 per quarter or CA$49.99 per year; and Singapore sits at SG$29.98 per quarter or SG$69.98 per year. Existing Hotstar subscribers transition automatically to an equivalent plan.

The strategy is a pointed one. Instead of chasing the same global hits everyone else streams, JioHotstar is betting that an underserved, multi-language audience — both the diaspora and curious newcomers — wants a service built specifically for them. “Streaming has spent the last decade competing on the size of its catalogue,” JioStar’s head of international business, Amit Malhotra, said in a statement, noting the opportunity to build for a “broader, underserved global audience.”

Whether that bet pays off depends on execution. The catalogue is there, the brand migration is done, and the interactive features give fans a reason to pick JioHotstar over a general-purpose service. If you’ve been chasing Indian-language shows through scattered channels and outdated apps, this is the cleanest option yet — and with the door left open on sports, the service still has room to grow into something even bigger.