IN THE EARLY 2000S, DURING THE heyday of the cable TV business, Rishi Malhotra was a young vice president at HBO, charged with figuring out how to sell on-demand programming. Over several years, he turned HBO On Demand into a $100 million business. “One of the things I learned from HBO was that really premium, unique content helps build a brand,” he says, “and it’s something people will pay for.”
In 2008, Malhotra decided to take his skills to Saavn, a business-to-business company that distributed Indian music to platforms such as iTunes and Amazon. By 2010, Saavn had transitioned into a streaming service, and in 2018, it was renamed Jio-Saavn after Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries acquired the company and merged it with Jio-Music, the streaming service run by telecom…