Hotstar looks to foray into content for a billion screens with Hotstar Specials

Star India today announced the launch of Hotstar Specials, the OTT platform’s ambitious content foray featuring shows from India’s most acclaimed storytellers. 

For its first set of Hotstar Specials, Star India has partnered with Shekhar Kapur, Neeraj Pandey, Kabir Khan, Nikkhil Advani, Ram Madhvani, Venkat Prabhu, Sudhir Mishra, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Nagesh Kukunoor, Mahesh Manjrekar, Vishal Furia, Rohan Sippy, Debbie Rao, Sharad Devarajan and Salman Khan. 

Hotstar Specials will feature an extensive variety of Indian stories, mounted on a big scale, unconstrained by format. The company’s ambition is not to make this a narrow or niche play, but to provide variety across genres and formats. The stories will be available in seven languages. 

Commenting on the latest initiative, Sanjay Gupta, MD, Star India, said, “Star has always challenged conventions and has been at the forefront of content reinvention in India. With the mobile phone leading an explosion in the number of screens in the country, we feel that our content also needs to reinvent and boldly move forward. With Hotstar Specials, we hope to create the biggest Indian stories delivered to a billion screens. To bring this vision alive, we are proud to partner with a stellar line up of talent who are headlining our first set of Hotstar Specials.” 

Speaking to Adgully, Gupta said, “When we announced the launch of Hotstar in January 2015, we were told that it would be ahead of its time. Over the last few years, we were able to build Hotstar into a very meaningful destination for consumers and today, as we speak, roughly around 150 crore people come and watch Hotstar every month. We think the time is right to take the next leap and reach out to a billion screens in the next 3-4 years.” 

Hoststar is looking to create disruption with its Specials, which will be available to the over 150 million monthly active users as well as global audiences of the OTT platform. With 350 million downloads, Hotstar has been at the forefront of change in the space of digital content in India. 

Launched in early 2015, Hotstar is one of India’s most downloaded apps and has attracted more than 400 million followers on the back of a highly evolved video streaming technology and high attention to the quality of experience across devices and platforms.