Streaming giant JioHotstar will introduce a Play Along feature for the quiz show "India Ke Top 1% – The Anil Kapoor Show," launching September 19, 2026, letting viewers answer in real time from their own smartphones at home. The host is actor Anil Kapoor, production is by Banijay Asia, and it airs on Star Plus. The aim is to turn the phone in hand into a second screen and pull in viewers who used to just watch in front of the TV. This clearly defined move — who did what, and when — gives Japanese companies marketing products or brands in India a clue for how to design participation pathways into their own campaigns.
According to a report by afaqs, "India Ke Top 1% – The Anil Kapoor Show" begins airing on Star Plus at 8 p.m. on September 19. Production is handled by Banijay Asia, with Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor hosting. Rather than textbook knowledge, the show is built around questions testing logic, common sense, split-second judgment, and observation, with 100 contestants advancing through 13 rounds. To go along with the broadcast, JioHotstar has built a Play Along feature that lets viewers answer the same questions from home through the app. While following the broadcast on TV, viewers can pick their own answers on their phone and aim to win prizes such as smartphones and smart TVs. The show also emphasizes that families can take part together.
JioHotstar is the gateway to large-scale streaming in India, born from the merger of Disney-affiliated Hotstar and Reliance's streaming service. Alongside sports, dramas, and movies, flagship terrestrial broadcast shows are also folded into the app. It's precisely because TV viewing and phone taps overlap within the same app ecosystem that a design like Play Along — getting viewers to move their hands in step with the broadcast — can work. At a time when recording and catch-up viewing have made "watching later" the norm, this is also an attempt to recreate a reason for everyone to watch together at a set time. At the core of this feature is the idea of turning a show from mere footage into something viewers get to touch and play with.
Here's the mechanism, as afaqs reported it. Each of the 100 contestants enters the show with INR 100,000 (about ¥170,000). Money lost to a wrong answer isn't deducted from the individual — it's added to a shared prize pool. That pool is capped at INR 10 million (about ¥16.6 million), and the final question is set at a difficulty level only the top 1% of viewers can answer. The show's title, "Top 1%," refers to that narrow slice of viewers who can reach the final question. All yen figures here are rough conversions at roughly ₹1 ≈ ¥1.66 as of September 2026. INR 100,000 equals 1 lakh, and INR 10 million equals 1 crore — mixing these up throws the yen conversion off by a factor of ten, so the base units are checked back against each other here to confirm them. Contestants' failures swell the pool, and the top 1% take it — a structure that turns the tension of winning and losing into a number.
At the core of Play Along is the ability for viewers to answer the on-air quiz in real time. Opening the JioHotstar app streams the same questions the studio contestants face onto the home screen, and viewers pick their answer on the spot. Viewers who rack up correct answers can aim for physical prizes such as smartphones and smart TVs. It's a design meant to build both a reason to watch the show through to the end and a reason to want to watch again the following week, using prizes and the participation experience as its two wheels. The claim that families can play together assumes shared viewing in the living room, and is expected to extend actual viewing time itself. What this feature really does is turn the passive time of watching a broadcast into the active time of moving your fingers.
Advertising and media trade outlet afaqs reported this initiative as a move to bring interactivity to a TV show. What the outlet covered was the show's format, the prize structure, and the framework of real-time participation from home via Play Along — it did not go so far as to cover anonymous reactions within the show or individual assessments. This piece stays within the scope of what was actually reported. The fact that an operator bundling broadcast and streaming placed "the viewers' own participation" at the center of a new show fronted by a marquee host, in itself, points toward a direction of using TV as the entry point into an app experience.
What this move suggests to Japanese companies is that in India, a pathway that gets people to "move their hands right there," not just "watch," becomes a weapon. Quizzes, polls, and entry campaigns tied to a show or sports broadcast make a product easier to stick in a viewer's memory, and raise the value of the sponsorship slot itself. The idea of building a TV commercial into the entry point of a broadcast follows on from a piece that traced how India's first TVC was designed OpenAI Sells "the Voice of Local Languages" in India, the Design of ChatGPT's First TV Commercial— that example runs along the same line. The pattern of layering advertising onto a national event is McDonald's India's World Cup tie-in shown concretely there, and the technique of turning numbers and names into play to generate buzz connects to How Kohli turned 9,230 runs into 9,230 rupees with a pricing move this too. Just adding one small point of participation that people can respond to while watching or visiting a store changes how much of an impression it leaves.
If show-driven audience engagement through an app catches on, other streaming operators and production companies will move to claim the same second screen too. The shift from passively watching a broadcast to actively entering, answering, and sharing also overlaps with how games celebrate daily logins, or how social-media-driven impulse buying moves inventory. In fact, a single social media comment that emptied out store shelves PM Modi's "Melody" comment sells out India's 1-rupee candy instantly— that incident shows just how fast Indian consumers connect watching, buzz, and purchasing. Show-tied participation experiences are companies' attempt to design for that speed themselves.
JioHotstar's Play Along is a device for capturing both viewing time and buzz by placing the viewers' own participation at the center of a flagship show. The next move Japanese companies engaging Indian consumers can take is to design one small participation pathway that people can answer from their phone on the spot — matched to a broadcast, an event, or an in-store experience — and test it in a limited area. Measuring the response through hard numbers like entry counts and answer rates makes the investment decision for the next campaign far more concrete.
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