No more HBO content on Disney+ Hotstar from March 31

Disney+ Hotstar, the country’s largest streaming platform, will not carry HBO content on its platform from March 31 as its global parent The Walt Disney Company embarks on a cost-cutting restructuring plan to turn its streaming business profitable.  

The OTT player’s official Twitter handle tweeted the update on Tuesday night in response to a user asking about Season 2 of the show ‘Perry Mason’ streaming on Disney+ Hotstar. “Starting 31st March, HBO content will be unavailable on Disney+ Hotstar. You can continue enjoying Disney+ Hotstar’s vast library of content spanning over 100,000 hours of TV Shows and Movies in 10 languages and coverage of major global sporting events,” said the streaming platform on Twitter.  

The development would mean successful shows such as The Game of Thrones, The Last Of Us and Succession will move away from Disney+ Hotstar, which is already contending with the loss of 3.8 million subscribers or 6% of its total base during the October-December quarter due to the IPL void. It lost out the digital streaming rights of the marquee cricket tournament to Reliance Industries-backed Viacom 18 for the 2023-27 cycle.  

Disney+ Hotstar’s subscriber base, which spans Asia but is dominated by India, fell from 61.3 million as of September 2022 to 57.5 million as of December 2022. As a result, US-based parent division Disney+’s net subscriber base fell from 164.2 million to 161.8 million during the three months – its first-ever loss since 2019 when the division was launched. Walt Disney Company follows an October-September calendar.  

But viewership of English content in India is limited and Disney+ Hotstar has a strong grip on the Hindi content landscape. The OTT player’s Hindi original titles – shows and movies – accounted for almost 50 per cent of the most-watched Hindi content during July-December 2022, far ahead of rivals and fellow globally backed giants Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, according to ‘Streaming Originals in India: The 2022 Story’ report by consultancy firm Ormax Media. Seven out of the top 15 most-watched Hindi original shows and seven out of the top 15 most-watched Hindi original films by Indian OTT viewers during July-December 2022 were from the Disney+ Hotstar stable.

The update comes in the wake of The Walt Disney Company’s former chairman Robert Iger returning as CEO, after the dismissal of Bob Chapek, with a restructuring plan. The plan involves cost cutting to the tune of $5.5 billion, 7,000 jobs getting axed, and clubbing the film, TV and streaming divisions into a new division called Disney Entertainment.

After growing at unprecedented rates during the Covid pandemic, the OTTs are in a bind now as global media giants are facing headwinds and economic uncertainties. All major media companies such as Netflix, Amazon and the Big Five movie studios -- Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, Walt Disney Pictures and Columbia Pictures – are choosing to focus on profitability. They are abandoning plans to burn money on OTT content and sacking employees after a bloodbath at the US capital markets in 2022. In fact, Warner Bros. has put the launch of its OTT player HBO Max India on hold indefinitely.

Also Read: Disney to lay off 7,000 employees to make business more profitable