Reliance and Disney+Hotstar are currently in the middle of a merger. But what has caught more headlines than the merger is the domain “jiohotstar.com”. Initially, a Delhi-based developer bought the domain and asked the executives at Reliance to buy the domain from him so that he could fund his college. He later sold the domain to two Dubai-based siblings. Some legal notices were also involved. Now, in a surprising twist, the siblings are willing to sell the domain to Reliance free of cost.
The siblings revealed that they never wanted to sell the domain for profit despite receiving many offers. Their only aim was to support their seva goals. They wrote on the website, “Recently, we received many emails from people wanting to buy the domain. To check if these offers were real, we reached out to some of them. We found that while some offers were fake, a few were serious and offered a lot of money. But even with these genuine offers, we never wanted to sell the domain. We made this clear by replying to everyone that the domain was not for sale.”
They further wrote, “Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talk and even some videos about why we own the domain and if it connects to a possible business deal between Jio and Hotstar. We want to clear up any confusion: we never expected this attention and never meant to cause any controversy. Our only goal was to support the developer and share our seva (service) journey.
With all the discussions happening, we now think it might be best for Team Reliance to have this domain if they want it. We are happy to give jiohotstar.com to them for free, with all the proper paperwork. To be clear, this is entirely our choice. No one from Reliance or any legal group has contacted us or pressured us in any way. We made this decision on our own, without any pressure from friends, family, or anyone else.
If Reliance is interested, they can contact us at jainam@1xl.com or jivika@1xl.com, and we will handle the transfer smoothly. If they are not interested, that’s okay too. We will continue to share updates about our journey and work.”
It will be interesting to see how this story unfolds in the future and if Reliance will get the domain back or not.