In its latest quarterly earnings report, Walt Disney announced that it has added nearly 8 million subscribers to its OTT platforms over the last three months. The company said Disney+ Hotstar, the company’s Indian OTT platform, accounted for a little over half that number.
Walt Disney revealed that with this growth, Hotstar now has over 50 million subscribers with an average monthly revenue per user of $0.76 (Rs 58.83), compared to a monthly average revenue per user of $0.49 (Rs 37.93) in Q1 2021.
However, this number pales in comparison to the average monthly revenue per global subscriber excluding Disney+Hotstar, which stands at $6.33.
With an internal prediction that the company will grow its subscriber base to a quarter billion from international users, market analysts are worried about the revenue such growth will bring. In response, the company’s stock fell 5 percent, a two-year-low, to $99.47 per share.
Additionally, analysts are worried that subscriber growth will not be substantially higher in the second half of the year, according to Reuters. Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s claim that Hotstar’s growth was aided by the start of the IPL season in India does not dispel this idea.
Fellow streaming competitor Netflix recently announced that it had lost 200,000 subscribers in Q1 as OTT platforms started to saturate the market. Although Netflix remains the market leader, it had predicted losing another two million subscribers in Q2, although co-CEO Ted Sarandos did say that the company saw a “nice uptick in engagement in India”.
