The Silicon Review ^Asia

Star India and Star US holdings are looking to boost up their video streaming service, Hotstar by investing Rs 1,066 crore when the IPL tournament is about to start later this month. Presently, the digital and television rights for the IPL tournament are exclusively held by Star India, and the media company has plans to expand to over 300 million viewers from its past 202 million viewers last year. As found from certain sources, the investment made by Star India was Rs 832 crore, while the rest Rs 234 crore were to be made by Star US holdings.

The fund infusion comes after about seven months when Novi Digital got Rs 516 crore from Star US. Novi Digital is a wholly owned subsidiary of Star India and is the owner of Hotstar. It also received $192 million from Star India between late 2016 and early 2017. Hotstar’s competition in the Indian market comes from Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Times Internet’s MX Player, Eros Now, Voot, ZEE5 and ALTBalaji among others. Even YouTube didn’t stay back from introducing its paid streaming service, YouTube Premium, that aims to offer access to its original programming across various genres to its customers.

The usual content for Hotstar includes sports, films and catch-up content from the network of television channels for its growth, but looking at the way its rivals are approaching their audiences with their original content, Hotstar has earmarked Rs 120 crore to produce original content under its own banner, Hotstar Specials. In order to do that, it has partnered with fifteen film-makers for this initiative.