Gurugram – Thursday January 9, 2019: techARC today released a techINSIGHT analysing the on-demand movie content available on Hotstar, one of the leading OTT entertainment platforms in India.

Faisal Kawoosa, Founder & Chief Analyst, techARC while sharing the key inferences said, “Hotstar is known as a platform for its exclusivity of sports content be it IPL or any other major championship. The platform has been able to leverage that seasonal equity of viewership to a continuous engagement by offering a diverse range of content which provides entertainment for all.”

Key Analysis

Number of Movie Titles – 3,624

Movies in Hours – 7,021

Languages – 9

Mono-lingual Movies – 3,342

Multi-lingual Movies – 282

Hindi Movies – 994

English Movies – 768

Regional Movies – 2,910

Hindi, Malayalam and English are the top three languages in which movies are available on Hotstar.

Movies are available in 16 Genres. Drama leads with 32.5% of titles followed by Action and Comedy movies.

20% of the movie titles are Premium.

Over two-thirds (75.8%) movies available were released in this millennium.

96.3% (3,488 movie titles) are of U/UA content rating as per Indian CBFC rating parameters.

Click for High Resolution Infographics

Recommendations

Language: Only 8% of the titles available can be watched in multiple languages. Hotstar must increase the multi-lang titles to increase the re-purposing of the movie content available. At the same time the platform must harmonise the set of languages made available to users across the multi-lingual titles available.

Genre: There are only 14 titles in mythology genre available on Hotstar. Mythology being one of the most popular genres in India should be strengthened by Hotstar in terms of choice availability. The other theme it should explore is Biopics, which is just 1% of the total titles available on the platform.

Content Rating: Hotstar is not following the CBFC certification pattern of U, UA, A and S ratings as per which movies are certified in India. The classification followed of G, PG, 12+, 15+, 16+ and 18+ is very similar to the Motion Picture Content Rating system of Ireland. Though there is no harm in following any other rating system as long as it serves the purpose of restricting / warning viewers about the type of content/language available in the movie, it would be ideal for Hotstar to follow the nomenclature prescribed by CBFC.

The second important issue with ratings on Hotstar is that 54 movie titles do not have rating at all. These include some of the titles which have explicit content not prescribed for every one’s view. This means no parental lock will work on such titles at the moment.

Last Word

While the debate about OTT platforms to be regulated or not by TRAI still continues and there are divergent views on the subject, there is a need to have periodic audit of the content available on these platforms in the interests of the consumers especially from compliance, competition and regulatory standpoints to have proper checks and balances in place.

About techINSIGHT: This techINSIGHT is based on the data collected by techARC from Hotstar publicly. The analysis is based on on-demand movie titles only. The data captured is updated as of December 31, 2019.