Hotstar has become one of the most popular media streaming applications in India. The company has released its annual report called "India Watch 2019" with its performance of the year. Hotstar has finally crossed 400 million downloads mark on Android, iOS and other platforms combined. When compared to 2018, the company claims that it has seen two times growth in the number of app installs and three times growth in video consumption.
With Hotstar hitting 400 million downloads, the company has announced that the video consumption growth was majorly due to regional content, which accounts for 40 per cent of overall content consumption. The company was able to achieve this milestone as the users were installing the application 555 times per minute on an average. This resulted in bringing twice as installs as they received in 2018.
One of the major reasons Hotstar became so popular has to be the sports streaming. The company has reported that they reached over 300 million active users during the IPL 2019. Even during the India vs New Zealand ICC Cricket World Cup 2019 semi-final, Hotstar hosted over 25 million live viewers and they even crossed 100 million viewers during a single day.
Unlike Netflix and Prime Videos which drive most of the traffic from metro cities, Hotstar report claims that most of their entertainment consumption was made from non-metros locations including as Lucknow and Patna. The numbers from non-metro cities have surpassed cities like Delhi, Bengaluru and Kolkata.
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In case you are wondering what men are watching apart from sports, the company has reported that more than 40 per cent views of family drama are coming from men. However, over 45 per cent of total entertainment consumption came from women.
In order to improve user engagement, the company even introduced a game called Watch ‘N Play. The game itself recorded huge participation with 64 million viewers during the IPL 2019.
