This October, Hotstar reached a new milestone for views that’s about 61.3 million. The main fact is the average subscriber’s asset dropped by 9 percent this year. Disney + Hotstar India’s top streaming service of The Walt Disney Company unveils a subscriber growth of 42 percent between October 2021 and October 2022. As we have reached the end of 2022, Disney is following the October-to-September discal calculation was stood at 61.3 million which was 43.3 million just a period ago.
Hotstar Subscribers Boost by 42 Percent in this Q4 FY22
However, the company claims a fall in Hotstar’s subscriber growth in this quarter Q1 FY2023, for the absence of the IPL property on the platform. This year, Mukesh Ambani-led Viacom 18 piped Hotstar to conquer such digital streaming rights of those coveted cricket leagues from 2023 to 2027. IPL has remained the premier money magnet in India’s OTT landscape. Digital viewership has been projected to touch 523 mi8llion in FY23 confirms by a FICCI-EY report.
Disney CFO Christine McCarthy highlights the IPL absence impact, “ At Disney+ Hotstar, we are currently expecting that subscribers will decline in Q1 due to the absence of the IPL, but we do expect to see some stabilization in Q2.”
Media analysts currently reckoned about Disney+ Hotstar might face an existential challenge in the absence of IPL. Recently, it celebrates a 22 percent share in India’s subscription SVOD portion “which may drop sharply, with people potentially moving to Voot or Jio to watch IPL”, told Karan Taurani, SVP at Elara capital.
Taurani confirms Hotstar might lose a minimum of 30-40 percent of paid subscribers within the next six to eight months as their subscriptions getting expire that’s quite pretty much in line with Disney’s own estimates.
Disney + Hotstar also facing a kind of challenge of dropping an Average Revenue Per Paid Subscriber (ARPPS) On overall growth in subscribers, the platform’s monthly ARPPS fell by 9 percent from $0.64 to $0.58 as per the statement.
Disney stated, “The average monthly revenue per paid subscriber for Disney+ Hotstar decreased due to lower per-subscriber advertising revenue and a higher mix of wholesale subscribers, partially offset by an increase in retail pricing,” and also added, “The slightly lower advertising revenue at Hulu and Disney+ Hotstar also impacted direct-to-consumer revenue in the fourth quarter relative to the third quarter,”
We will see that the streaming giant’s ARPPS boosted marginally from $5.62 to #5,83 at the end of Q4 FY22. Disney also added more than 12 million subscribers around the world that’s close to 3 million additions coming from Disney + Hotstar.
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