The Reliance–Disney–Paramount saga

How three boardrooms, two continents, and one streaming war redrew the global media map

Every few decades, a handful of deals end up rewriting the script for an entire industry. The ongoing Reliance–Disney–Paramount story is one of those. Three legacy names, two parallel mega-transactions, and a set of consequences that the Indian broadcast sector and the global media business are still working through 18 months after the ink dried.

The short version is familiar by now. On February 28, 2024, Reliance Industries and The Walt Disney Company announced a binding pact to merge Viacom18 with Star India. On August 7, that same year, Skydance Media closed a USD 8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global, backed by the Ellison family and RedBird Capital. Within six months, therefore, two of the old-world media holdings — Disney’s India business and Paramount Global as a whole — had been refinanced, reassembled, and handed to new majority owners. The rest of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 have been about making the numbers work.

The India trigger-How JioStar came to be
The Indian leg of the saga carries a specific valuation: the combined Viacom18–Star India entity, now trading as JioStar, was pegged at approximately USD 8.5 billion at the time of announcement. Reliance agreed to pump in around Rs. 11,500 crore (roughly USD 1.4 billion) into the merged company as growth capital. The equity cap table ended up at 16.34 percent directly with Reliance Industries, 46.82 percent with its Viacom18 subsidiary, and 36.84 percent with Disney. In effect, the Ambani family and Reliance end up controlling 63.16 percent of the largest content house in India, while Disney is left with a meaningful minority and a passage home.

The logic, on paper, was inevitable. Disney Star had been bleeding money. Analyst notes circulated in late 2023 pegged the operational loss at over USD 300 million annually, a hole that had grown wider after Disney+ Hotstar lost its Indian Premier League digital rights to Viacom18 in 2022. Hotstar’s subscriber base fell from a peak of around 61 million to roughly 36 million by early 2024. Meanwhile, Viacom18, flush with the IPL digital win at USD 3.05 billion and backed by a separate USD 1.78 billion investment from Bodhi Tree and others, had been building a free streaming play on JioCinema. Merging was the cleanest way out for Disney and the quickest path to scale for Reliance.

What the combined entity actually owns
JioStar today is the single biggest consumer of content-rights cash in the country. It operates 115 television channels across 10 languages, two streaming platforms in JioHotstar and JioCinema (now consolidated into one front-end), and a combined sports portfolio that includes IPL on TV and digital, the ICC global rights until 2027, Pro Kabaddi League, the Women’s Premier League, Wimbledon, and Premier League matches in India. Combined reach is estimated at over 750 million viewers. For context, Sony-Zee’s failed USD 10 billion merger in early 2024 would have created a smaller rival; JioStar, as it stands, has no real domestic peer.

The financial scale is just as striking. Consolidated revenue for the merged entity in FY25 closed at approximately Rs. 26,500 crore (USD 3.2 billion), with an operating loss that narrowed to Rs. 1,300 crore versus the Rs. 4,800 crore combined losses the two sides were running a year earlier. Bernstein and JPMorgan now both expect JioStar to turn EBITDA-positive in FY27. Ad revenues for the combined entity grew 22 percent in the first nine months of FY26, aided by IPL 2025, which delivered a reported Rs 4,000 crore in ad sales across TV and digital — a record for the property.

The Paramount chapter- An Ellison reset
The US leg of the saga runs on a different rhythm. Skydance, founded by David Ellison and long a co-producer on Paramount’s biggest theatrical hits, including Top Gun: Maverick and the Mission: Impossible franchise, finally absorbed its partner in a two-step transaction valued by analysts at about USD 8 billion, including the take-out of controlling shareholder National Amusements. Larry Ellison and RedBird Capital backed the cheque. David Ellison took over as Chairman and CEO; the long-time Paramount leadership exited.

The new owners inherited a mixed bag. Paramount+ carried around 77 million global subscribers at the time of closing, CBS remained a top-three US broadcast network, and the studio had a blue-chip film slate. But Paramount Global also came in with roughly USD 14 billion in net debt and a linear cable business shrinking in the high single digits every quarter. Within a hundred days, the Ellison team announced USD 2 billion in cost savings, a restructuring of streaming bundles, and a fresh sports-rights review. By December 2025, Paramount+ had crossed 85 million subscribers, helped by a re-priced bundle with Apple TV+ in the US and a content-swap agreement that brought select Paramount originals to JioHotstar in India for an undisclosed fee believed to be in the USD 150–200 million range over three years.

Why the two deals matter together
Viewed in isolation, each transaction is a piece of financial engineering. Taken together, they describe a larger shift. Legacy Hollywood, which spent the past decade trying to be both a studio and a streamer, is now quietly unbundling again. Disney got smaller in India to protect its balance sheet at home. Paramount passed the baton because it could not keep up with the CapEx of a pure streaming play. Reliance, meanwhile, has gone the other way: fused telecom, content, sports, and advertising in a single stack — the same playbook it ran on oil-to-retail — to build the kind of integrated media house that Western groups have tried, and largely failed, to assemble.

There are second-order effects that the industry is only now pricing in. For Indian producers and syndication houses, consolidation has meant fewer buyers, tougher negotiations, and, increasingly, revenue sharing rather than upfront commissions. For advertisers, JioStar now controls close to 39 percent of the Indian television advertising pie and a little over a quarter of digital video advertising, according to Pitch Madison’s 2026 mid-year update. For regulators, the competition question hasn’t gone away: TRAI and the CCI both cleared the deal with behavioural remedies, but a revised cross-media ownership framework is expected later this year.

What to watch from here
Three storylines will define the next twelve months. First, whether JioStar can hold IPL ad rates in the Rs 18–20 lakh per 10-second slot range it set in 2025 when ICC events return to the fold. Second, whether Disney exercises its right to increase or exit its 36.84 percent stake after the three-year lock-in, Wall Street currently assumes an orderly trim rather than a full exit. And third, whether the Ellison-led Paramount can do what Bob Iger could not: grow streaming subscribers while shrinking the linear tail, without spooking creditors who still hold that USD 14 billion of debt.

The practical reality is already visible. A single company now sets the tone for almost every content commissioning meeting in Mumbai, every satellite capacity negotiation with ISRO and international fleet operators, and every pricing conversation around smart-TV and connected-TV inventory. A second company, reshaped in Los Angeles, is about to decide how much of its catalog moves to Indian screens and on what commercial terms. Eighteen months in, the Reliance–Disney–Paramount saga is less a series of deals and more the new operating environment. Everyone else is adjusting to it.