Without Its Hot Star HBO, A Disney+ Sub Is Slim Pickings

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”.

By Prahlad Srihari

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.

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. Rewatching The Leftovers helped me unwind, and brought me a strange comfort during the pandemic. Now, that security blanket has been frayed.

On Netflix, I often find myself browsing aimlessly. On Hotstar, I already knew what I was looking for. More often than not, it was an HBO or FX series. What was advertised on Hotstar’s front-page carousel had never been a true reflection of the riches in its catalogue. Though the UI was anything but easy to use, the luxury of being able to watch my beloved shows any time I wanted meant I was more willing to excuse the bad web design. Not anymore — in spite of the recent redesign. Had I known Hotstar was about to lose HBO, I wouldn’t have renewed my subscription this February. In the words of the inimitable Al Swearengen, “If I bleat when I speak it’s because I just got fucking fleeced”.

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.

In searching for “the dirtiest thing on Disney+”, Kate Knibbs jokingly concluded in a Ringer article it was “the Puritan’s go-to streaming service”. Hotstar seems to be following suit, as befits the Disney brand. Not renewing the licensing rights for HBO content feels like a move to keep the content on Hotstar more family-friendly — a symptom of the infantilising turn that art has taken in this prudish moral climate. Art doesn’t need to challenge or provoke; it needs to teach or reinforce what we already believe in. 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.

AT THE END OF 2020, Iger’s predecessor Bob Chapek had laid out a plan to reach 260 million paid subscribers for Disney+ by the end of the 2024 fiscal year. That target is so far short by 100 million. For the first time since its launch, the subscriber base shrunk by 2.4 million in the exit quarter of the 2022 fiscal. Hotstar’s subscriptions had taken a 3.8 million hit, which Iger chalked up to the loss of IPL. It is important to note that the Mouse House earns $5.95 per month from a Disney+ subscription in the US, compared to the $0.74 it earns from a Hotstar subscription in India. So, one subscriber in the US is worth eight in India.

It is to offset these losses that Disney has decided to reduce the spending on licensed content. But this “less is more” strategy only works if you have enough quality content to insulate the service from subscriber fallout over cutting licensing deals with recognised players like HBO. Hotstar doesn’t. All the same, cost control has become a bit of a battle cry — a course correction after a few years of over-ambitious commissioning of content. In the wake of bleeding subscriptions, even Netflix has had to temper its spending on original content to improve its margins. Don’t forget HBO Max was set to launch in India last year until Warner Bros. Discovery decided to take a rain check. Why? To cut costs.

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? As with AMC and MUBI, could Amazon Prime Video offer up HBO content as a channel and charge an additional fee atop our Prime subscriptions?

On losing IPL to Viacom 18, Hotstar faced an exodus of subscribers. Losing HBO may be a blow, but not as crushing. For those loyal to HBO are but one small cluster in Hotstar’s massive subscriber base. The break-up may hit some of us hard. But the choice ahead is clear: it’s time to Mulan or move on.