JioStar’s Sports & Live Experiences division will soon have a new CEO: Ishan Chatterjee. He’s stepping up from his current role as Chief Business Officer for Sports Revenue, SMB, and Creators to fill the position left by Sanjog Gupta, who is departing JioStar Sports to become the Chief Executive of the ICC.
Ishan Chatterjee, who joined JioStar in September 2024, has over two decades of experience in business and revenue, with a specialisation in scaling digital platforms and fostering strategic growth. Before joining JioStar, he was the Managing Director of YouTube India — a position he assumed in 2018 after serving as Director of Product Partnerships for APAC Emerging Markets.
Currently, Chatterjee is responsible for JioHotstar’s overall monetization and revenue growth. He manages critical areas like sports and small and medium businesses and is also developing JioStar’s creator ecosystem, establishing new revenue streams and turning the platform into a dynamic center for content and commerce.
Now that you’re a bit more familiar with Ishan Chatterjee, it’s time to shift our focus to a much more important and pressing matter.
We all know that JioStar emerged from a joint venture combining the assets of Reliance’s Viacom18 and Disney India. JioHotstar is the streaming platform born out of this merger, effectively bringing together the content libraries and user bases of what were previously JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar.
In recent months, JioHotstar has shattered numerous streaming records, especially in the live streaming of major sporting events such as IPL 2025, the ICC Test Championship 2025, and more.
However, despite breaking all these viewership records, we can’t deny the fact that the platform has struggled to properly address the growing number of user complaints. These include technical glitches, audio and video quality issues, an ad-heavy viewing experience, buffering problems, and more, particularly during the live streaming of major sporting tournaments, including this year’s IPL and ICC Test Championship.
The streaming of the ongoing India vs. England Test Series (Anderson–Tendulkar Trophy 2025) and this year’s Wimbledon has also faced significant backlash and scrutiny from JioHotstar users, citing the same issues, along with complaints about abruptly shifting focus to marquee Wimbledon 2025 matches while neglecting others, and more.
All of this has seriously impacted JioHotstar’s brand image and audience perception in recent times.
Ishan Chatterjee’s promotion makes him the top executive responsible for the end-to-end delivery of all sports and live event content on JioStar’s platforms, with JioHotstar being the primary digital outlet for this content.
There’s no denying that Chatterjee’s performance will be tested. The most urgent task under his leadership will be to protect and enhance JioStar’s (JioHotstar) reputation, while ensuring continued subscriber growth and revenue from its sports offerings. Failing to address these technical problems would directly undermine his ability to achieve those goals.
Excessive ads, buffering, and quality issues directly impact user experience, which can lead to churn and make it harder to monetize the platform effectively in the long run, especially for premium live sports content. As Chatterjee currently leads the monetization strategy, he knows that a poor user experience will hit the bottom line hard.
While JioHotstar is a product of a major merger and has achieved impressive viewership numbers, its technical performance during live sports remains a key vulnerability. Ishan Chatterjee, in his new leadership role, is now the person ultimately accountable for fixing these issues, ensuring that JioHotstar lives up to its potential as a premier live sports streaming destination and maintains a strong relationship with its growing user base.
So, basically, to wrap this up, all Ishan Chatterjee has to do is fix a multi-billion-dollar streaming platform’s biggest headache while keeping millions of sports-loving fans from rioting. Let’s see how he tackles that! Stay tuned for more updates.