Aided by IPL, Disney+ Hotstar adds over 4 mn subscribers in March quarter
The Indian market was a key contributor to Disney+’s global subscriber additions in the January-March 2022 period, helping the streaming giant at a time when rival Netflix lost viewers.
The management of The Walt Disney Company, which owns the streaming platform Disney+, said on Thursday that its Disney+ Hotstar service, which operates in India and other Asian countries, had contributed to over half of the global subscriber additions of nearly 8 million in the March quarter. This was led by the Indian Premier League (IPL), whose television and digital broadcast rights are currently with Disney-Star. The company follows an October-September accounting year.
“We ended the quarter with nearly 138 million global paid Disney+ subscribers, reflecting close to 8 million net additions for the period. A little over half of those net additions were from Disney+ Hotstar, which benefited from the start of the new IPL season,” said Christine McCarthy, senior executive vice-president and chief financial officer of The Walt Disney Company, in an investor call.
Disney+ Hotstar has over 50 million paid subscribers, accounting for 36.4 per cent of the total paid subscriber base of Disney+, she said.
Netflix last month indicated it had lost 200,000 subscribers globally in the March quarter, projecting that it saw an additional loss of 2 million subscribers in the June quarter, led by issues such as account sharing by customers and rising competition in key markets.
Netflix had however said that user engagement was witnessing an uptick in India and that it was planning an ad-supported platform or advertising video-on-demand service (AVOD) to propel growth across markets.
While Netflix as well as Amazon Prime Video have depended on a combination of movies, original shows and co-productions in India to drive viewership, Disney+ Hotstar has counted on its sports content, notably, cricket to drive viewership in the country.
Disney’s McCarthy reiterated that this strategy would continue into the future, though the company was lining up some 100 shows in India in the months ahead.
“One-third of the $32 billion content spend for fiscal 2022 will be going to sports. Of the balance of the $32 billion, a meaningful amount of it will be dedicated to investments in general entertainment content that we can leverage across all our distribution platforms. We have about 500 shows in the pipeline for local content outside of the U.S. Of this, 140 is in South East Asia. In EMEA, it is 150, and in India, it is 100 shows,” she said.
Disney CEO Bob Chapek also said that the company’s ad-supported subscription service would roll out in the US by the end of 2022. It would launch internationally by 2023, expanding the reach of Disney+ to more customers and improving access.
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