Disney + to India and Southeast Asia next year
Sources close to Disney reveal that the entertainment company wants to bring their Disney + streaming service to India and a number of other Asian countries.
Disney + & Hotstar
In India, Disney will use the existing streaming service Hotstar to launch Disney +. Then they want to go with the Disney + / Hotstar combination to Malaysia and Indonesia.
Hotstar is the market leader in India, mainly because people have the rights to broadcast cricket. The service had 300 million monthly users at its top, but that number dropped to 60 million when the cricket season ended. By coming up with original content, Disney hopes to stabilize that number of users.
Asia
The Asian expansion of Hotstar is no surprise. In recent years they have been launched in the US, Canada and Great Britain. It is no coincidence that these are countries with significant concentrations of people with Indian roots.
Disney + is currently available in the US, Canada and the other EU countries. Next week will be Australia and New Zealand, and in mid-March 2020, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France and Spain will be added.
In India, a Hotstar subscription currently costs $ 14 a year, but that price is going up. That price increase is being implemented at an opportune moment, just before the start of the IPL cricket season, early next year. Analysts expect a price of more than $ 30 a year.
Even at that price level, Disney would be able to compete on price. Netflix costs around $ 7 per month in India and other Southeast Asian markets, but this year the streaming pioneer introduced a cheaper subscription of just $ 2.8 per month in India and $ 4 per month in Malaysia.