Disney+ Hotstar India Content Chief Reveals Growth Strategy

Naman Ramachandran

Gaurav Banerjee, head of content at Disney+ Hotstar, India, has revealed the streamer’s growth strategy in the country.

Banerjee was speaking at Indiantelevision.com’s annual industry event, The Content Hub, in Mumbai on Tuesday, in conversation with the organization’s founder, CEO and editor-in-chief Anil Wanvari. The thrust is to expand original programming in languages beyond Hindi, Banerjee said.

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“We recognized early on that massive growth in India is going to come by thinking about our content strategy and multiple languages, and not just in Hindi,” Banerjee said. The streamer currently commissions in the Hindi, Tamil and Telugu languages and also programs in the Malayalam language.

Banerjee talked up the success of originals in Tamil, including “November Story” and “Kana Kaanum Kalangal” and “Parampara” and “Jhansi” in Telugu. “Bigg Boss,” the Indian version of “Big Brother” is produced in multiple languages including Malayalam. The service has found success in Malayalam by acquiring features “Mukundan Unni Associates,” Malikappuram,” “Romancham” and “Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey.”

“We have incredibly diverse context that is coming together in all of these languages,” Banerjee said. The next push is building a Malayalam-language originals slate. “The regional slate is critically important,” Banerjee said. Every Disney+ Hotstar original is dubbed into all the major Indian languages.

One of the challenges facing Disney+ Hotstar in India is losing the streaming rights of the lucrative Indian Premiere League (IPL) cricket to rival Jio, which is offering the currently ongoing tournament for free. Disney’s Star retained the television rights and ratings have been robust.

When asked by Wanvari if losing the IPL to Jio had caused churn and loss of subscribers, Banerjee said, “There is a lot of competition, and it’s getting much more intense, which is fantastic because it really means that the size of the pie is worth fighting for. And I think it’s recognition that we are now talking to the most populous country in the world, we’re talking to the country, which is the fastest growing major economy in the world, a country, which hopefully in five years will be the third largest economy in the world.”

“This means that there are great opportunities that are there today and that are going to come in the future as well,” Banerjee added. “This is a market, which everybody is looking at with a lot of hope. Because nowhere else can you see the kind of scale that you can potentially see in India. [..] There is truly an opportunity today for this being India’s moment and for what follows being India’s decade and India’s century.”

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