Type of site Video on demand Area served India | Headquarters Mumbai, Maharashtra Industry Streaming | |
 | ||
Available in Hindi, English, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali Owner Star India
(21st Century Fox) | ||
Hotstar (stylized as hotstar) is a digital and mobile entertainment platform, owned by Star India.
Contents
History
After the beta version of ‘hotstar.com’ went live in January 2015, Star India officially launched hotstar in February 2015, right before the 2015 Cricket World Cup. At the beginning, it was intended to serve as a mobile application that would support streaming of the Cricket World Cup with some entertainment content. However, Hotstar expanded its offering with 35,000 hours of content, spread across 8 languages from the entertainment, movie and sports channels owned by Star India.
Recently, Star India hired Varun Narang, a former executive of US online video service Hulu to head the product and technology division at hotstar. Hotstar also hired iRock Production's Siddhartha Jain as the creative director for original content, as it is "hell-bent" to develop original content.
Viewership
The app garnered 340 million views for all 49 matches during the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 and over 200 million views during the Indian Premier League Season 8, this year. With over 50 million downloads, Hotstar has more than 100 advertisers on the platform [1]. Since the content is available free of cost to the users, Star India aims at monetizing solely through advertising. Some cricket talk shows like Juicy Half Volley (A World Cup Weekly Wrap-up) has been put particularly on Hotstar.
Platforms
In addition to the website, Hotstar is available as an application across mobile devices which are on Android, iOS and Apple TV platforms. Hotstar Android application is currently available in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh.