JioCinema announces annual subscription plan of Rs 999; adds HBO, WB shows and films

About a month after announcing the partnership, American television network HBO's content is now available at Mukesh Ambani-led JioCinema. HBO and Warner Brothers inked a partnership with Reliance to bring its original content to JioCinema after bidding adieu to Disney+ Hotstar on March 31. JioCinema has also announced an annual subscription plan for Rs 999 for Hollywood content.

JioCinema has been making its way quickly to Indian users' daily watchlist with first bagging exclusive digital rights for the biggest sports tournament, the Indian Premier League and now with exclusive American content.

HBO originals like Game of Thrones, and Succession have been a massive hit among the Indian audience. With the loss of HBO content, it has been estimated that a loss of about 8 million users.

The IPL, which was also earlier available for streaming on Disney+ Hotstar took a massive hit when Reliance won the bid for about Rs 23,000 crore. 

Karan Taurani of Elara Capital observed that despite monetisation, JioCinema's pricing is at the lower end of premium OTT platform annual pricing - Hotstar, Amazon, and Netflix whose pricing is in the range of INR 1000-2000 for an annual plan. "However, we don’t see a large scale paid subscriber base due to this, as Indian audience is value driven and may not pay this much only for price HBO/Warner Bros content," he added.

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"We don’t foresee a large scale paid subscriber base for Jio Cinema only for HBO/Warner Bros content; expect more content offerings to bundle (new films direct OTT or any other global content) in order to achieve a scale in this sort of any offering," Taurani added.

To make the Indian audience pay just for the HBO content is unlikely to pay off immediately. However, with other content still available for free JioCinema is on its way to consolidating viewers.

Disney + Hotstar has had the highest paid subscriber base (61 million paid subscriber base before they lost IPL and HBO content) in India primarily due to IPL, global content, web series, movies and catch up Tv content; in order to scale up to that level for a paid subs base, Jio Cinema will need to expand its content offerings, according to Taurani.

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