JioStar unveils new RIO, to launch new regional Star Sports channels by rebranding Sports18 channels

JioStar — the mega-conglomerate created from the merger of Reliance Industries-owned Viacom18 and Walt Disney-owned Disney Star (or Star India) — has revealed its new RIO (Reference Interconnect Offer) document stating the à-la-carte prices of its channels, including, for the first time, Network18’s news and other channels. In addition to prices, an RIO is a useful reference to show which channels from a broadcaster are being discontinued and which ones are being rebranded with new names, and JioStar has a great deal of changes in store. This coincides with the unveiling of JioHotstar — the merged streaming service replacing both Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema — on Friday, 14 February 2025, exactly 3 months after the merger was completed on 14 November 2024.

These changes, which see JioStar launch new regional sports channels and shutter several niche and underperforming channels, will take place on 15 March 2025 (Saturday). Interestingly, this comes exactly two years since another set of channel launches, renamings and shutdowns from the then-Disney Star in March 2023. The existing Sports18 channels from the pre-merger Viacom18 will be rebranded as regional channels using the Star Sports 2 name, and two more regional HD sports channels will be launched, showing JioStar’s aggressive expansion into regional sports channels that cement its absolute dominance in sports.

Meanwhile several niche and regional channels — including some longstanding channels from the erstwhile Viacom18 like Comedy Central, Vh1 and MTV Beats — will be closed, as will Star Life, which rebranded from Fox Life in April 2024. Moreover, JioStar will go from three Odia-language channels to only one, as both Colors Odia and the HD feed of the badly struggling Star Kiran will be axed, leaving only Star Kiran’s SD feed. However, some other channels that the Competition Commission of India (CCI) ordered to be sold or axed in October 2024 — such as Colors Marathi, Jalsha Movies, Hungama and Super Hungama — are seemingly spared for the time being, though their future remains uncertain.

The below table displays all the channels from JioStar that will be launched and rebranded, and the next one shows the ones that will be shuttered. Far more channels will be axed in this round of changes than launched or renamed, and as a result sports channels — especially regional ones — will occupy a much higher percentage of JioStar’s channel offerings than before.

1. Star Life is the only one of these channels to have undergone multiple renamings and rebrandings. Its previous names include The History Channel (November 2003), Fox History & Entertainment (November 2008), Fox History & Traveller (May 2011), Fox Traveller (October 2011) and finally Fox Life (June 2014 with a graphics update in February 2018), before becoming Star Life in April 2024 and hence retiring the Fox brand among Disney channels worldwide. The HD feed was launched by the then-Fox Traveller in October 2012. ↩︎

It’s clear that JioStar is simultaneously expanding aggressively into regional sports channels — especially with almost all major cricketing events under its umbrella, plus many other sports — and bringing an end to several diverse channels from niche genres, whose audiences have largely shifted to streaming platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Spotify, not to mention JioSaavn and the newly formed JioHotstar itself.

In this article, on the next page, we discuss JioStar’s aggressive expansion into regional sports channels, and in a separate article we will touch upon the impact of closing several long-running Star and Viacom18 channels, particularly in niche genres.