What strategies should competitors apply to compete with Hotstar

15 Sep

Marketing Strategy

Q1. Shubiksha, started out as the cheapest supermarket cum superstore in town but today it has become an irrelevant brand. Lot of efforts are on to revive the same. Can you suggest some strategies for the same?
Q2. Hindustan Times has started charging for its weekend magazine Brunch as it feels it is not able to reap the benefits by giving it free of cost. This is in stark contrast to Times of India which gives at least one newspaper free with its daily paper. Can you compare these strategies?
Q3. Hotstar is owned by Novi Digital Entertainment Private Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Star India which was launched in January 2015. But star officially launched the domain and the mobile app in February 2015, just before the ICC cricket world cup 2015. It has expanded its offering with 35,000 hours of content, spread across 8 languages from the entertainment, movie and sports channels.
Objectives of Launching Hotstar:
In India, the internet speed is a problem. So, the initial aim for the developers to make the platform to operate even at as low as 50kbps. So, great video experience on any bandwidth – even on 2G! It was developed such a way so the application can run on as many as 7,000 operating systems any screen sizes.
According to a survey, more than 78% of the 152 million Indian internet users are mobile and the average spending on mobile internet is Rs. 235 per month. So, surely Star has seen some potential in Hotstar to be a game changer. STAR INDIA is expecting that the platform will contribute around 20-25% to the overall revenue for the company in the next 4 years.
Approach/ Strategy Adopted:
In case of watching videos, everybody prefers YouTube, but in case of latest movies and television shows YouTube cannot satisfy users’ expectations. And here comes the Hotstar app. The Daily Soaps are not the only thing that you can watch on this app, it even lets you stream live telecast of nearly every international sport on your Phone that has been broadcasted on any of the Star Sports channel. With 10 million downloads in the 40 days since its launch, Star India’s mobile application Hotstar is undoubtedly the hottest digital media product today.
There are about 20,000 advertisers on television for this newly launched platform across all TV channels. Whereas there are 500,000 advertisers on digital marketing platforms. Digital media is expected to grow at 37% in 2015, compared with an average rate of 35% over the last two years, so star India will open a large scale of advertising in this country. It approaches to a larger and valuable target audience, the younger generation and those in the 25-and-above age bracket, wanting to consume content on the go.
Moreover, Hotstar has done brilliant job when it comes to optimizing the search engines. More than 12% of their visitors come from search engines like Google, Bing, MSN and Yahoo. The investment on this platform by Star stands around Rs 1,200 crore over five years.
Top Features of Hotstar:
1. You can share any content on Hotstar with your friends on Facebook & Twitter.
2. You can watch movies which are available in the library for free.
3. A lot of popular old shows like The Great Indian Laughter Challenge, Khichdi & Sarabhai vs. Sarabhai are available with all episodes.
4. TV Channels (shows from which are available) include Asia net, Channel V, Life OK, MAA, Star Jalsha, Star Plus, Star Pravah, Star Utsav, Star Vijay, Star World & Suvarna.
5. You can add that video to your playlist and watch them later.
6. You can even download many shows to watch them offline.
Accomplishments:
It was launched on 1st of February and became the fastest to cross one million download marks in six days. It outdid apps like Facebook (10 months), Instagram (2.5 months) and Twitter (one year), the app has managed to achieve an average TSV (time spent per viewer) of 24 minutes a day.
According to ALEXA, Hotstar is now ranked 123 among all websites in India, and the global rank is 1997, which is improving day by day. It is the most reached online sports platform according to the Tele Web Audience Measurement system.
a. What strategies seem working for Hotstar?
b. What strategies should competitors apply to compete with Hotstar?

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