Disney+ has made headlines since it stepped into the Indian OTT space through Star India owned Hotstar in April 2020. The streaming platform amassed eight million subscribers within one week of its launch, and is now aiming for a 100 million subscriber base.
After being rebranded to Disney+Hotstar, the OTT platform has been chasing a large audience with gripping original content, new Disney-Marvel-Pixar-Star Wars shows besides sports which is temporarily less owing to the pandemic and the lockdown.
Quite recently, Disney+Hotstar announced ‘Multiplex’ and will premiere direct-to-digital releases of big bollywood movies starting with late Sushant Singh Rajput’s Dil Bechara on 24 July, given the theaters and cinema halls are shut. All this is to ramp up its subscriber numbers in India.
Revealed The Walt Disney Company APAC chairman and Star and Disney India president Uday Shankar in a recent interview with ET Now, “What we are looking at is to get tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people to subscribe to Disney+Hotstar. Once we do that, it becomes an attractive business with many possibilities.”
Shankar was also asked if he considers TVoD to be a scalable model in OTT business, to which he said, “I am not a big fan of the pay-per-view model. Those are very transactional with customers and I don’t think a platform which has a long-term vision and wants to be the substitute for TV in this country should do something like pay-per-view. Tomorrow, we might change our strategy but that’s not what we are looking at right now.”
Disney+Hotstar is estimated to reach 93 million paying subscribers by 2025 at monthly ARPUs under $1, as per a report from MPA. The OTT service offers a huge library of premium local and international entertainment content and sports.