Feeling the pressure from rivals such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which are investing heavily into local and original content in India, Hotstar, the video-on-demand service from Star India, has decided to step on the gas with a war chest of Rs 120 crore.
Hotstar, which has the highest number of downloads (over 350 million) and claims of 150 million monthly active users, has so far relied on films, sports and catch-up content from Star India’s channels.
Sanjay Gupta, managing director, Star India, told ET that 80% of the viewership on Hotstar comes from drama and movies, while sports, which include Indian Premier League (IPL), BCCI matches, Pro Kabaddi, and Indian Super League, though give a spike in viewership, amounts only to about 20%.
“Till two or three years back, there were only 200 million screens available to consumers between TV, mobile phones, and theatres all put together. Today, given the data revolution in the past two years, content is being consumed over 600 million screens. The big change is that now there is at least one screen for each person in a large number of urban or rural household, who want content for themselves,” Gupta said.
And with consumers’ expectation of content changing, Hotstar has decided to “take the leap” on content.
For its first set of ‘Hotstar Specials‘, Star India has partnered with storytellers including Shekhar Kapur, Neeraj Pandey, Kabir Khan, Nikkhil Advani, Ram Madhvani, Venkat Prabhu, Sudhir Mishra, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Nagesh Kukunoor, Mahesh Manjrekar, Vishal Furia, Rohan Sippy, Debbie Rao, Sharad Devarajan and Salman Khan.
While Gupta refused to quantify the investment, sources within Star India have confirmed that the company has earmarked Rs 120 crore for original content on Hotstar as of now. “Right now, the plan is to spend up to Rs 120 crore on ‘Hotstar Specials’. Depending on the performance, the budget could be extended by another Rs 50 odd crore,” the source said.
As reported earlier, Hotstar had received Rs 516 crore in funding in July last year from Star US Holdings. In the same month, the company named Nikhil Madhok as EVP and content head for originals. However, the position of chief executive for Hotstar is lying vacant after the exit of Ajit Mohan, who joined Facebook last week as managing director of India business.
Gupta said that Star is yet to finalise a replacement for Mohan.
Also, this is not the first time that Hotstar has delved into web-first content. It has, in the past, produced ‘Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai Take 2’, ‘On Air With AIB’, and ‘Tanhaiyan’.
“We have 15 names today and there are more to come. By end of this quarter, we will start rolling out the content,” Gupta said.
Interestingly, all the content under ‘Hotstar Specials’ will be available in seven languages – Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam – as the company believes that consumer wants the content in her language.
“This offering is very distinct and different from what we have done so far. I think it is bigger than announcing Hotstar four years back as at that time, it was an internet to get people to consume content on mobile phone. Today, that is a reality and we have sort of established it as one of the important destinations for story consumption,” Gupta said.
The Indian video OTT ecosystem has seen a major boost in the past couple of years since the advent of Jio, which made data prices dirt cheap and added many first-time internet users. Apart from 33 existing players, Flipkart and Paytm are also planning to enter the OTT space.
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