Jio Cinema Ventures Into Kids Entertainment, Partners Pokemon For Shows & Movies

In a major boost to scale up India’s kids entertainment segment, Jio Cinema, the entertainment arm of Reliance, has inked a pact with Japan’s The Pokemon Company to stream children’s shows and movies on its platform. However, the financial details of the deal are still under the wraps. 

As a part of this deal, Jio Cinema will be the exclusive streaming partner of Pokemon in India, where the content major will stream more than 1,000 episodes and around 21 movies of the Japanese anime series. Starting with season 12, every Thursday, Jio Cinema will unveil a new season on its platform. 

Through strategic partnerships with leading local and global studios including Cartoon Network Studios, Dreamworks, EOne, The Pokemon Company & Animaccord, among others, the offering will add fresh content every week. The OTT platform said that it will stream kids’ content in five languages.

Commenting on the development, a Jio Cinema spokesperson said, “Our newly added kids and family category will unlock access to millions of families across India and enrich family consumption. With the best content from India and around the world, available in multiple languages, we aim to be inclusive and an enabler of wider consumption with fewer barriers.”

Jio Cinema is geared up to stay ahead in the big Indian (over-the-top) OTT race. In the global content space, the OTT giant has also entered into an exclusive partnership with Warner Bros to bag the streaming rights of HBO, Max Original and Warner Bros content. 

It is also in the race with other OTT players for streaming rights of a number of sports events. After bagging the digital streaming rights of the Indian Premier League (IPL), it announced that the OTT generated more revenue than its rival Disney which had the telecasting rights. It also created the world record of bagging the highest number (32 Mn) of concurrent views during the final match of the last IPL.

However, Jio Cinema just got a big blow from its competitor Disney+Hotstar as the latter ticked a 5.3 Cr live views during the first semi-final match between India and New Zealand of the ongoing cricket world cup. 

Lately, the OTT platform has been exploring variations in content. In August, it entered into the esports arena by partnering with the game development platform Krafton India to livestream the official Battlegrounds Mobile India Series (BGIS). To grab more audience, it announced that all the matches of BGIS will be dubbed in Hindi and English. 

Besides bagging streaming rights for international content, the OTT major is also planning to take on the regional ones. It recently partnered with the Bengali OTT platform hoichoi to stream the Hindi dubbed versions of its content.