Based on the newest regulatory filings, Hotstar, Star India’s over-the-top (OTT) service, has been valued at roughly 1,850 crore rupees ($265 million).
Duff and Phelps, the corporate financial and global valuation adviser, conducted the valuation study.
In India, there are now eight leading video streaming providers. They are all eagerly wooing the Indian audience. The foreign ones include Amazon Prime Video and Netflix.
The Indian streaming services, on the other hand, include Sony Liv of Sony, Alt Balaji of Balaji, Zee5 of Zee, and Voot of MTV.
Running their own streaming offerings limited to their own customers, two telecommunications companies are also in operation like Airtel TV of Airtel and Jio TV of Reliance Jio.
Nevertheless, Hotstar is the largest video service. Having the highest number of downloads the same as Jio TV, Hotstar though has paying consumers.
It has roughly 100 million application downloads. This figure makes it ahead of its international mainstream competitors like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Netflix has 5 million application downloads in India, while Amazon Prime has over 50 million.
Information documented in the Registrar of Companies demonstrated that Star US injected 516 crore rupees ($73.9 million) worth of capital infusion to Hotstar. This move was a part of the technology platform boost and the content production investment agenda of Star US.
The documents also included information about Hotstar’s total number of paid subscribers. As of July, the streaming platform has approximately 700,000 customers.
Hotstar is managed and owned by Novi Digital Entertainment, a subsidiary of Star India Private Limited.
Currently offering more than 50,000 hours of movies and TV content in over eight different languages, Hotstar also gives its audience live coverage of every popular sport including the Indian Premier League.
According to the Hotstar website, the streaming platform is “a complete video destination” for OTT video customers.
This is made possible by the company’s increased attention to the quality of its customers’ experience across diverse platforms and devices as well as its sophisticated technology used for video streaming.
The tablet and mobile applications are available on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. It can be accessed at the Hotstar’s official website: www.hotstar.com.
