Cricket helps Hotstar user base to touch 300 million

Chennai: The World Cup cricket had helped top content platform Hotstar grow its active monthly user base by 50 per cent in the June quarter.

Among content platforms, Hotstar saw its active monthly user base grow to 300 million in the June quarter against 200 million in the March quarter. According to RedSeer Consulting, this was mainly due to the live streaming of the World Cup cricket.  

"Nothing unites our country like cricket. Every time there is a World Cup or any other sizeable cricket tournament, we see a very high activity on these content platforms; people don't just want to watch matches, they also want to read and talk about it." says Ujjwal Chaudhry, Director, RedSeer Consulting

Usually large content platforms like Hotstar see a growth in user base by around 10 per cent on a quarterly basis. However, the June quarter saw a growth of 50 per cent. As the cricket season is over, Hotstar is likely to fall back to its previous user base levels in the September quarter. However, they might retain 10 to 20 million new users.

Dailyhunt is the second largest content platform with 190 million and has seen a 20 per cent growth in June quarter over the previous quarter. MX Player has 176 million monthly active users and Chinese video streaming player, Tik Tok, which has been controversial due to its content, is fourth with 129 million. Gaana is the largest when it comes to audio streaming at 110 million followed by Saavn at 92 million. Amazon Prime has 13 million MAU and Netflix 11 million. Netflix had recently lowered the subscription rates to attract more users.

“Netflix is largely a premium content platform. So we will have to wait and see how this move will help increase the user base,’ said Chaudhry.

Further, RedSeer also has been witnessing some of the new aggregators widening their content size by including shortform content.