Research: Hotstar has 69.4% of the Indian on-demand video streaming market, Amazon has 5% and Netflix has 1.4%; James Murdoch says Hotstar has 145MAUs
As Amazon and Netflix turn to the land of Bollywood in search of new users, they continue to face stiff competition from local giant Hotstar.
Context & Ripple Effects
This research quantifies what earlier coverage only argued qualitatively: back in February, reporting showed Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar outcompeting Netflix in India on price and library depth. Now the numbers are stark — Hotstar at 69.4% share against Amazon's 5% and Netflix's 1.4%, with James Murdoch citing 145M monthly active users.
What makes this worth tracking is that the gap never closed. AllianceBernstein's later estimate put Netflix at roughly 6.5M Indian subscribers against Disney+ Hotstar's 40M+, blaming thin local content, and HSBC's 2025 tally shows JioHotstar at 300M paying subscribers versus 65M for Prime Video and 20M for Netflix.
First-order effects
- Netflix and Amazon enter India facing an incumbent whose 145M monthly users dwarf their combined reach, forcing both to compete on Hotstar's terms — aggressive local pricing and Bollywood-heavy catalogs rather than global subscription economics.
Second-order effects
- Global players respond by localizing: AllianceBernstein's finding that Netflix's slow growth stems from lack of local content points directly at catalog investment as the forced response, while Hotstar's audience scale gives it pricing power over advertisers and rights holders.
Third-order effects
- The pattern held across eight years of coverage — from this 69.4% share reading to HSBC's 300M-subscriber figure for JioHotstar — suggesting India's streaming market structurally consolidates around a locally-anchored champion, with only ~24% of OTT users paying, so reach and monetization remain decoupled.
The trend: India's streaming market consistently rewards locally priced, home-market-content platforms over global subscription services, with Hotstar's dominance persisting from 2018's 69.4% share through JioHotstar's 300M paying subscribers in 2025.