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Hotstar

Hotstar

Tagline

Go solo

Net Worth

$1,500,000,000

Started in (City)

Mumbai

Started in (Country)

India

Incorporation Date

11th December, 2015

Bankruptcy Date

-

Founders

  • Sunil Rayan

About

Hotstar also known as Disney Hotstar, is an Indian OTT (over-the-top) streaming platform which is owned by Novi Digital Entertainment. The headquarters of Hotstar is located in Mumbai. It is the one stop shop for all your entertainment needs. Starting from award winning international series, movies, sports shows, regional movies, serials and shows, critically acclaimed movies, lifestyle shows, documentaries and news it pretty much has everything. Apart from English it is available in in the following regional languages namely Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali. Streaming services available in India, United States, United Kingdom and Canada.

Beginning

Star India launched officially Hoststar on 11 February 2015 after the 15 months of the development of the Hotstar up come with the free service to all the cricket lovers in the country with 2015 Indian Premier League. Then getting very good viewership rating with the introduction of the IPL Hotstar also started many online sports streaming like Football and Kabaddi. In April 2016, Hotstar launched a subscription tier primarily oriented towards international content and the possibility of premium sports content. The service launched alongside a new deal to carry HBO content uncut on the platform, with its introduction coinciding with the season 6 premiere of Game of Thrones. The 2016 launch of the LTE-only wireless carrier Jio spurred the growth of mobile broadband in India, and was credited in turn for having bolstered the growth of streaming video in the country. While services of U.S. origin such as Amazon Prime Video and Netflix saw some growth in the Indian market, Hotstar has remained the dominant streaming service. By July 2017, Hotstar's apps had reached 300 million downloads, and it was reported as being the top video streaming app in the country. By 2019, the service had over 150 million active users monthly. In March 2019, ahead of the 2019 Indian Premier League, Hotstar migrated existing subscribers of its All Annual Sports plan to a new entry-level plan known as Hotstar VIP. Intended as an introductory option, it includes access to sports content (including the IPL, 2019 Cricket World Cup, and English Premier League football), early access to serials before their television broadcast, and original series from the new Hotstar Specials banner. It is also payable via cash. Chief product officer Varun Narang described the offering as "a value proposition built with the Indian audience at the heart of it".

Road to Success

Hotstar is the official online streaming partner of IPL. For a country like India which has crazy fandom for cricket paired with the launch of LTE services in 2016, people watched cricket beyond stadiums and television sets. In fact, 2019 IPL finale was watched live by 18.6 million users using the Hotstar website and app which now has become the new record. Unlike other major OTT platforms where payment is compulsory, Hotstar is available for both paid and non paid users. currently there are two paid subscriptions namely Hotstar VIP and Hotstar premium which again is further divided based on the needs of the viewers. it should be noted that the quality of the free content is as equally good as the paid ones. In short it uses freemium model. It is the marketing strategy of Hotstar. In India majority of households have only one TV set in their homes and the fight for the remote is never ending. Hotstar rightly studied this and made content for every persona. Star Networks entire shows were made available in the platform. Plus with the advent of cheap data plans and smartphones everybody can watch their favourite shows or movies without hassles. In the recent times the viewers for Indian web series has been increased. To cater the needs of such binge watchers, hotstar has produced some great Indian original web series.

Challenges

Recently Hotstar has been associated with Disney and it has been rebranded Disney Plus Hotstar. Because of this their library of movies has been increased tremendously. Having the the entire collection of Disney movies and Marvel cinematic universe movies is definitely going to be a path breaker. Some of the famous web series worth watching in Hotstar are Criminal Justice, Hostages, Special Ops, City of Dreams, Roar of the Lion and Aarya.It has a wide collection of popular international shows for its VIP and premium users. Some of the top notch international series available in Hotstar are Game of Thrones, The Office, Modern Family, Chernobyl, Big little lies, Its always Sunny in Philadelphia, This is us and many more.

Failures

On the other hand, the other issues that plague the Hotstar experience have been present from nearly the start. In various informal conversations, the company has said that it’s working on fixing most of them, but changes have come at a snail’s pace, at best. For example, the company took a really long time to add Chromecast support, and when it eventually launched, it came without basic features like subtitles. Streaming used to drop off at random, and although this has now improved and subtitles have also been added, the fact is all this took months, even though these are standard features on rival platforms.

Achievements

  • In 2016, Hotstar awarded as Best Indian streaming service by TechCrunch
  • In 2019, Hotstar awarded as Most Concurrent Viewers of IPL by mint
  • In 2020, Hotstar awarded as Largest Ever Single Day Reach by Inspire2Rise

CEOs

  • Sunil Rayan