Disney to roll out Disney Plus streaming service in India by May next year

On-demand video streaming service market is booming in India. Be it national or international firms, everyone wants to own a piece of the India pie.

Next in line is Walt Disney which plans to launch its premium streaming service Disney Plus in the country within the next six months.

It also plans to introduce Star India-owned Hotstar with Disney plus catalogue to Indonesia and Malaysia among other Southeast Asian nations, according to a Techcrunch report.

Meanwhile, Hotstar, which has some Disney content on its premium subscription, has claimed to bring Disney Plus to India in a tweet without revealing the date.

Disney streaming services promise to offer originals exclusive to the domain and will feature nearly 500 films and 7,500 episodes of television from the Disney universe. Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic content will be exclusive to the service.

On Tuesday, Disney Plus was officially rolled out in the US market. A day after its launch, Disney Plus claimed to sign up 10 million users.

At present, Hotstar has a leadership position in India. It claims to have over 300 million MAUs. Recently, Flipkart had also announced streaming service.

The entry of Disney will further intensify the competition in the booming Indian OTT market. The existing players in the segment are aggressively adopting ways to woo millennials.

After Amazon, Netflix, which claims 1.5 million subscribers base at the moment, had recently launched a mobile-only subscription at Rs 199.

Besides Hotstar, MX Player, Jio, Zee5, AltBalaji and Amazon Prime; Alibaba has also been planning to have its streaming product in India.

The on-demand streaming market has been growing at a higher rate than the global average in India. According to a PwC report, it is projected to grow at 22.6% CAGR, from $297 million in 2017 to $823 million in 2022.