American streaming giant Disney+ operates in India through collaboration with Hotstar. Needless to say, Disney+Hotstar is the single largest OTT platform in India. In fact, it is so big that there is a difference of about 25 million subscribers from Prime Video which is the second largest OTT platform.
So, no doubt the insane popularity of Disney+Hotstar is not random. Several factors make it the favorite streaming service in India. One is pricing and the second is the content it offers.
It is leaps and bounds more affordable than Netflix or Prime Video and even the content it offers easily surpasses that of Netflix.
But the reason Disney+Hotstar manages to provide good content at such a great price is simple. They use ads to reduce the price and those having the lower tier of the plan have to tolerate a few ads to enjoy the movie/series.
This is kind of good because not everyone has a problem with the number of ads Hotstar pushes. Those who can’t afford the ad-free UI still get access to the content and they always have a way to upgrade their plan if they are not happy with the situation of ads.
Reports of Disney+ adopting the formula of Hotstar were in buzz for a long time but now the American streaming giant has revealed the price chart and time of the new change.
From December onwards, the existing $7.99 plan of Disney+ will be pushing ads in the UI. But, those wanting an ad-free experience can upgrade it to the plan costing $10.99 by paying 3 extra dollars.
This will certainly NOT help Disney+ in the first instance.
Because by introducing ads in the current plan, they are just troubling the subscribers who paid for an ad-free experience. This decision is primarily for increasing prices and less for increasing accessibility among subscribers.
The ideal scenario would be to introduce an ad-supported plan which is cheaper than $7.99 while the ad-free plan remains ad-free.
Thus, it might help the platform in the future but it will certainly NOT give Disney+ an instant boom of new subscribers in December.
We wish, they had learned from Hotstar.
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