Disney Plus, the eagerly-awaited streaming service of Disney Inc., finally arrives on Indian shores on 29th March. As per reports in the media, it will arrive on Hotstar’s existing platform and will be merged with Hotstar to form a single entity called Disney Plus Hotstar.
As readers must be aware, Disney already owns Hotstar in a deal that happened last year when Disney bought Hotstar’s parent holding company 21st Century Fox. Now’s the perfect time to leverage the acquisition, as Disney Plus seeks to launch in India, several months after its launch in USA and Canada in November 2019.
The collaboration with Hotstar will give Disney Plus the opportunity to mine the streaming platform’s vast viewer base of 28.6 million paid subscribers. Hotstar is the largest streaming service in India in terms of paid subscriptions. Will Disney Plus need an additional subscription or will it be boxed with a Hotstar subscription remains to be seen, as details will be laid out in the coming weeks.
Hotstar already streams a bevy of Disney shows and Marvel movies on its platform, courtesy its association with Disney, though Indian viewers are still deprived of the chance to watch the latest Disney Plus shows such as the popular The Mandalorian.
Regarding the price points, there’s still no information on the matter. Disney CEO Robert Iger elaborated on the matter, “We’re not giving specifics about the price at this point but expect that there’ll be two primary products brought into India. One will be more premium in nature that will include the entire library, so with the original programming and the other one will be more basic that will have the library and not the original programming.”
Watch this space at Binged.com for more details on this story.
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