Disney + Hostar
MISSION
About Disney + Hotstar
Disney+ Hotstar is India's leading online content streaming
platform offering content ranging from sports, movies, and
news to TV shows. It has a user base of more than 300 million.
Hotstar is the only online streaming platform in India to
effectively bring sports content along with exclusive content
from Disney. Hotstar is accessible across multiple devices, TV,
mobile, Chromecast, and other formats. Initially, Hotstar's
strategy was very different from those of Netflix and Amazon
Prime Video. Hotstar first started as a free content platform
with ads as a monetization lever. It eventually decided to take
up a model similar to those of Netflix and Amazon Prime and
launched its subscription offering with a free tier that is adsupported and the VIP and Premium subscription plans.
Riding high on the live streaming of the Indian Premier League,
Hotstar expanded its base to more than 100 million monthly
active users. The company-built technology for live streaming
of cricket matches and built products like "Watch N Play' to
engage the users. While cricket has been one area of strength
for Hotstar, the platform also brought exclusive content from
Indian content creators as well as from outside India, which is
another reason for the rapid growth in the number of its active
users. While Hotstar has a huge monthly active user base, a
large portion (more than 70%) of users do not purchase any
subscription plan and instead use the free tier of Disney+
Hotstar. Now, based on your understanding of the case, answer
the questions in the document given below.
Making
entertainment
accessible and
delightful to all
people through
seamless and
intuitive
technology and an
experience that
expands interests
and enables
deeper
connections
Factors driving to download
1)
2)
3)
4)
Content: constantly updated catalog and special content like Star India program, cricket
Accessibility: available in both Android and iOS
Price: flexible pricing = super 899/year, premium 1499/year, premium 299/month
Offline Viewing: allows users to download content and view it offline. This is useful for
users who travel frequently or have limited internet access.
5) Kid mode and multiple profiles
Suppliers of Content:
Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, Showtime, HBO Originals and Disney+ originals.
Hotstar partnered with a large number of Indian filmmakers to produce a series for the brand. In
sports it covers nearly every kind of event. And has won the deal with many events to stream their
events live. It has bought many popular series like GOT, Walking Dead, Homeland, City of Dreams,
etc.
Critique criteria
1) UI/ UX impression:
• from left to right: Category Home, Original Category, Coming Soon Category.There is a clear
inconsistency in the way content is laid out in categories. Some might argue that Disney +
Hostart was intended to make a clear distinction between content and trailers, using portrait
and landscape thumbnails, respectively, but it's still something to worry about.
• First, it's clear that the trailer not only shows vertical thumbnails on the home page, bu it's
also not meant to distinguish them. Then, if you decide to se portrait thumbnails in your
category, leave an awkward amount of white space so that they easily fit in another column
of thumbnails.
• With great care, Disney + Hotstar design discrepancies can be annoying, and wondering is
only a matter of time - is this design direction deliberately unconventional, or less well
thought out? Isn't it?
2) Search functionality:
• (Left) Before entering the search bar, (Right) After entering the search bar
• Disney + Hotstar also recommends popular content on the input page in front of the search
bar, unless there are almost no small thumbnails and CTA buttons. If you take a closer look,
the default search page feels uninspired for several reasons.
• The content is imbalanced. White space occupies more screen area than the content itself.
• Their popular category looks empty and unattractive, which defeats the purpose of the
nomination list.
• However, it's good that they make up for it when the user starts typing in the search bar.
Despite the strange selection of landscape thumbnails (again), the screen is well-filled with
content.
3) Content layout:
• On the Disney + Hotstar content page, all CTA buttons are in the same hierarchy. The
Download, Watchlist, and Share buttons all share the same scale and color, so they may not
be very effective in invoking actions.
• What seems to have missed the opportunity is the play button. It looks a little calm and
monotonous. Instead of chucking it in a color that matches the app's base colors at the
bottom left of the featured image, they could do more to give it a pizza.
• However, one of the unique features of this app is the Language Switching tab, which allows
you to view all available dubs and instantly select a language before playing the content. It
supports multilingual users and can help facilitate click-through in a diverse user base.
4) Playback
• During playback, the app allows the user to select their preferred streaming quality (auto,
high, medium, low) under the playback settings. This bandwidth-saving control is ideal w you
need the option to reduce data usage when streaming with mobile data. However, based on
past discussions about YouTube quality selectors, most people prefer to stream at the
highest quality by default and don't enjoy manually changing the video quality every time
they see something.
• This feature may be useful on platforms like YouTube, where most videos are less than 10
minutes long, as users are more likely to watch videos on mobile data. However, most
streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney + with more than 30 minutes of content watch
with unlimited data or WiFi. Therefore, the question remains. Do you really need a quality
selector here?
•
•
With Netflix, playback speed control, which allows users to choose to stream at 0.5x, 0.75x,
1x, 1.25x, or 1.5x, is a particularly useful feature for users with blindness or hearing loss.
People with hearing loss who are heavily dependent on reading subtitles can take longer to
speak, but studies of human hearing show that visually impaired people are more likely to
process audio faster. Therefore, you may prefer faster playback. This simple feature is a huge
benefit to accessibility.
As a time-saving control, Netflix has the standard Skip Intro and Play Next Episode buttons,
as well as allowing users to browse the episode catalog and switch directly to another
episode without leaving the player. There is an episode picker that you can do. There's also a
skip control around 10 seconds that you can gesture with a double tap on both sides of the
screen, and a native slider to adjust the brightness without going through the device's pulldown menu.
User experience, Pain points and recommendations:
Business model:
Average revenue per user (ARPU) for video streaming service Disney + Hotstar was in the second
quarter, ending April 3, 2021, due to lower advertising revenue from its flagship cricket facility,
the Indian Premier League. It has decreased.
Competitor analysis
Hotstar, a leading streaming platform in India, faces formidable competition from several key
players in the Indian market. Its main rivals include Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, SonyLIV, Zee5,
Voot, MX Player, and JioTV. Hotstar holds a dominant market share, exceeding 30%, but its
competitors are rapidly gaining ground, particularly Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
Netflix, with its vast international content library and growing collection of Indian originals, caters
to a diverse audience with various subscription options. Amazon Prime Video, bundled with
Amazon Prime membership, offers a strong selection of both Indian and international content.
Indian competitors like SonyLIV, Zee5, Voot, and MX Player provide a range of Indian
entertainment content and flexible subscription plans. JioTV, on the other hand, is a free service
offering live TV, movies, and shows.
Hotstar's advantages include an extensive library of Indian content, strong brand recognition,
and affordability with diverse subscription plans. However, it lags behind in terms of
international content and original productions, which are critical for attracting and retaining
users.
To sustain its leadership, Hotstar must continue investing in Indian content and ramp up its
original content production efforts. The battle for dominance in the Indian streaming market
remains fierce, with Hotstar striving to maintain its edge against both domestic and international
competitors.
Recommendations:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Give another login method option beside phone number, like e-mail.
Create account sharing feature.
Expand the market with adding more films/series.
Create “Share the film” feature to social media (in form of Instagram story).
Giving a reward to user that successfully recruit new user to subscribe Disney+ Hotstar (By
using referral code).
6) Create some kind of Hybrid mode so that user that already subscribed, don’t have to buy a
new number when access it outside the country.