New Dog, Old Tricks
It’s a well-established fact that streaming services have been increasing share of total TV viewership for years. A recent Nielsen report from May 2025 indicated that streaming represented an unprecedented 44.8% of total TV viewership, surpassing combined broadcast and cable viewing. While cord-cutting seems to be a long-term phenomena that continues to grow, there are still over 1 billion set-top boxes (STBs) worldwide still provide TV services to customers around the globe. In this landscape how do cable and Pay Tv service providers grow their customer bases?
Jio Platforms (pvt), a division of India’s Reliance Industries (500325.BS), India’s largest public company, is trying an experiment to make its STB and TV services business more ‘sticky’. If you have a Jio STB (10m to 15m est.) the company is offering to turn your STB into a personal computer, using your TV as a monitor for free. The new service, simply called JioPC, is aiming to make computing more accessible and affordable for Indian customers, especially in areas where PC penetration is low, at the same time offering a compelling reason for customers to maintain subscriptions and not ‘cut the cord’., provided that the service performs reliably..
In essence Jio is providing a Desktop-as-a-Service (DFaaS) offering to its customers, and at a very reasonable price -Free. They provide what is a ‘thin client’ (the STB) that does not run the full PC OS. Its goal is to decode the video stream, a virtual desktop, and to transmit keyboard and mouse input back to Jio’s servers, so the STB is doing only a bit more than it had already been doing as a stand-alone STB. The power comes from the Jio servers, which run the OS, the web browser, and other applications on high performance virtual machines, all of which have ample CPU, RAM, and storage, making them easily capable of handling all PC functions.
Jio’s network is built on low latency fiber, absolutely necessary for the desktop experience as it has to feel the same as if one was using a local PC. This also means that customers of this service do not need new STBs, as the box is primarily used for decoding the video stream with all the scaling done on the server side. This also means that Jio could run standard Linux on the cloud VMs where the full applications and browsers run without dressing up the STBs with additional hardware or software.
Jio is obviously targeting those TV viewers that do not have PCs, and while the service is currently free (if you are already a JioFiber customer), even a small monthly fee would be better for most of those customers than the large initial outlay required for a PC. There are limitations, as a stable internet connection is absolutely necessary and peripherals might present a problem, but as long as latency is not an issue, the service makes sense, especially in regions where the relatively high cost of a PC has led to low penetration rates. If you have an STB, the service makes sense and represents a relatively low upfront cost to the provider. It is nice when you can teach a new dog old tricks!
Jio Platforms (pvt), a division of India’s Reliance Industries (500325.BS), India’s largest public company, is trying an experiment to make its STB and TV services business more ‘sticky’. If you have a Jio STB (10m to 15m est.) the company is offering to turn your STB into a personal computer, using your TV as a monitor for free. The new service, simply called JioPC, is aiming to make computing more accessible and affordable for Indian customers, especially in areas where PC penetration is low, at the same time offering a compelling reason for customers to maintain subscriptions and not ‘cut the cord’., provided that the service performs reliably..
In essence Jio is providing a Desktop-as-a-Service (DFaaS) offering to its customers, and at a very reasonable price -Free. They provide what is a ‘thin client’ (the STB) that does not run the full PC OS. Its goal is to decode the video stream, a virtual desktop, and to transmit keyboard and mouse input back to Jio’s servers, so the STB is doing only a bit more than it had already been doing as a stand-alone STB. The power comes from the Jio servers, which run the OS, the web browser, and other applications on high performance virtual machines, all of which have ample CPU, RAM, and storage, making them easily capable of handling all PC functions.
Jio’s network is built on low latency fiber, absolutely necessary for the desktop experience as it has to feel the same as if one was using a local PC. This also means that customers of this service do not need new STBs, as the box is primarily used for decoding the video stream with all the scaling done on the server side. This also means that Jio could run standard Linux on the cloud VMs where the full applications and browsers run without dressing up the STBs with additional hardware or software.
Jio is obviously targeting those TV viewers that do not have PCs, and while the service is currently free (if you are already a JioFiber customer), even a small monthly fee would be better for most of those customers than the large initial outlay required for a PC. There are limitations, as a stable internet connection is absolutely necessary and peripherals might present a problem, but as long as latency is not an issue, the service makes sense, especially in regions where the relatively high cost of a PC has led to low penetration rates. If you have an STB, the service makes sense and represents a relatively low upfront cost to the provider. It is nice when you can teach a new dog old tricks!
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