India's biggest TV network has passed from Hong Kong to Murdoch to Disney to Reliance
The company now called JioStar began in 1990 as Star TV, a Hong Kong satellite venture beaming Hollywood-style English channels across Asia. Since then Rupert Murdoch, the Walt Disney Company and India's Reliance Industries have each owned or controlled it, and along the way it became India's largest television and entertainment network.
Hutchison Whampoa and Li Ka-shing launched Star with five channels, among them Star Plus, then in English, a sports channel, MTV Asia and the BBC's world service. Murdoch's News Corporation bought 63.6 percent of Star India in 1992 for $525 million and the rest at the start of 1993. The network then pivoted toward Indian audiences, adding Hindi programming, buying regional broadcasters such as Tamil Nadu's Vijay TV in 2001 and Kerala's Asianet in 2009, and launching Bengali and Marathi channels.
Rules shaped it too. When India capped foreign ownership of news businesses at 26 percent in 2003, Star handed control of Star News to the Anandabazar Patrika group, keeping a minority share it later sold; the channel became ABP News. Sport became the core of its value. Star won the cricket board's broadcast rights in 2012, then the global IPL rights from 2018 in a five-year deal worth about 163 billion rupees, beating Sony, and renewed the board's rights through 2023 for over 61,000 crore rupees. In 2015 it launched the Hotstar streaming app.
Disney agreed in December 2017 to buy 21st Century Fox, Star's parent, and when the $71.3 billion deal closed in March 2019 Star India became part of Disney India. It was renamed Disney Star in April 2022, and Disney later shut its English entertainment channels in India.
In 2023 Disney began looking for a buyer or partner, holding talks with Reliance, Gautam Adani and Sun Group's Kalanithi Maran. A merger with Reliance's Viacom18 followed in November 2024, valuing the combination at $8.5 billion and leaving Reliance with 63.16 percent and Disney with 36.84. Renamed JioStar, it runs more than 100 channels, and in February 2025 it merged Hotstar with JioCinema to create JioHotstar.
Source: Disney Star
