Sans HBO, Has Disney Lost Its Hot Star?

Disney's Lost Its Hot Star

If losing the rights to IPL last year cost Disney+ Hotstar close to 4 million subscribers, dropping HBO's roster may prove to be a considerable (even if not equal) setback to the streamer's growth. Prahlad Srihari writes.

SOMETIME IN 2021, I got a text that Deadwood had disappeared from Disney+ Hotstar without warning. The messenger of bad tidings was an old friend I had once held hostage at a party with fittingly drunken, expletive-laden, neo-Shakespearean rhetoric as I made a case for why the revisionist Western should be next on his watchlist. It took the enforced leisure of the pandemic for him to finally get to it. However, between finishing the second season and starting the final one, the digital rights to the series had expired. On learning of Deadwood’s disappearance, I opened up the app in panic to check if the other HBO shows I so cherished had disappeared as well. They hadn’t. I breathed a sigh of relief before writing back a text to the effect of “At least we still have all the others to watch and rewatch at our convenience”.

Not anymore.

“MUBI for movies, Hotstar for HBO” had been my mantra for the must-have, must-renew streaming subscriptions in a sea of one too many.

Alas, I may have jinxed it.

#OPINION

Sans IPL & HBO, A Disney+ Hotstar Sub Is Slim Pickings

By Prahlad Srihari

COME APRIL, we will no longer be able to stream any of the HBO shows on Disney+ Hotstar. Outcry has been quick and rising. Subscribers have turned to social media to vent their shock, grief and anger over the announcement. The timing of it couldn’t be worse as the final season of Succession has just got underway. If losing the rights to IPL last year cost the streaming platform close to 4 million subscribers, losing HBO may prove to be a considerable, even if not equal, setback to its growth. The move comes amid a strategic shift on Bob Iger’s return as Disney CEO and aligns with his $5.5 billion cost-cutting and restructuring blueprint. A pity that the very thing that helped grow Hotstar’s subscriber base is about to become a footnote in its digital history.

Of all the networks, HBO continues to enjoy a particularly hallowed reputation among TV lovers because it has always made the kind of shows that got people talking. Watching Game of Thrones, Succession and The Last of Us the same time the shows aired in the US sure had us all talking. Being home to HBO’s catalogue of better-than-TV had earned Hotstar second-hand bona fides as the place one went to find ground-breaking shows with a sophisticated edge. Losing access to those shows feels like losing a sense of essential TV history.

PERHAPS finding the last refuge from the tyranny of Disney’s monoculture on a Disney-owned platform may have been too good to last. Just as we were getting used to the idea of how streaming had democratised access and the entertainment industry with it, we are reminded it all rests on the vested interests of legacy media companies and content distributors. From a business perspective, negotiating licensing deals with rivals building their own streaming services is akin to cannibalising. If subscribers are streaming licensed content instead of original content, it ends up eating into the returns streamers expect to see while investing in their own shows. Yet, having a steady stream of licensed content remains valuable. Not every subscriber is itching to catch the latest show everyone is raving about on social media. For so many subscribers, there is nothing quite like rewatching old and familiar shows.

***

Since taking over 21st Century Fox, Disney has made a right mess of handling its film and TV assets. There is room for a doc on Ed Sheeran, but not for Searchlight titles like Tree of Life, The Favourite or The Wrestler. Death on the Nile got a theatrical release, but The Banshees of Inisherin and Prey didn’t. A year before, The French Dispatch was unceremoniously dumped on Hotstar without any fanfare. The good folks at CinemaRare do a much better job at informing press about new releases than Hotstar’s PR team ever has. Pixar has been mishandled as well: Turning Red went the direct-to-streaming route. With regards to shows, Hotstar hosts a selection of FX and Hulu titles, but not all. Atlanta is a glaring exclusion. For Justified and Fargo, we must turn to Amazon Prime Video. Not renewing the licensing rights for HBO content feels like a move to keep the content on Hotstar more family-friendly: In this spirit, Disney keeps feeding us more Marvel, Star Wars and other kiddie-leaning franchise dross. Never mind the grown-ups. As far as Iger & Co. are concerned, we don’t count.

FURTHERMORE, the Warner Bros-Discovery merger has forced HBO Max to remove dozens of titles, like Westworld and Raised by Wolves, from its platform. The disappearance of beloved shows from streaming platforms has been a reality check: streaming hasn’t quite ushered in the era of limitless access we had hoped for. This makes physical media all the more important. This also means piracy may soar again. According to Parrot Analytics, audience interest in Succession is over nine times that of any other [English language] show in India. If the show isn’t readily available on any platform soon in India, many fans will turn to illegal downloads.

Remember the frustration we felt when we had to wait a while before we could watch any HBO show, if we got to watch them at all? Remember the FOMO we felt when we were the last to join the discourse? Remember those pre-Hotstar times when we had to get resourceful if we wanted to watch an HBO show? We may not be entirely past those times. The question is: can Disney’s loss end up becoming another’s gain?

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