China wants to dominate AI. Disney+ Hotstar is helping

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning dominance are spaces that the Chinese government has set as a priority to dominate, over conventional western rivals like the United States. Curiously, one of the large companies lining up to capitalize on this push is India’s Disney+ Hotstar, which is rapidly picking up fresh AI talent from an office in Beijing.

“At present, our team has nearly 50 members, almost all of whom graduated from Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and other top universities in China,” a recruitment post in Mandarin distributed to students of Peking University said. The streaming service is offering discounted or free access to Disney’s theme parks and resorts to young talent willing to crunch the enormous amounts of data generated by Hotstar’s millions of viewers, most of whom are in India and Southeast Asia.

Former and current employees of Hotstar in India declined to discuss the subsidiary’s operations, and the company declined a request from Entrackr to comment on its operations there. Hotstar’s India privacy policy says that it reserves the right to share user data with “affiliated companies [...] in locations around the world”. 

The Chinese government announced in 2017 that by 2030, the country would endeavor to become a “global innovation center” in Artificial Intelligence, with targeted revenues of $147.80 billion from the industry. China’s university system was quick to follow with an increased focus on AI courses, for example adding over half a dozen undergraduate courses focused on the subject in 2021.

While China deeply leverages AI to power its sprawling surveillance state, its goals also envision enriching private enterprise that would help it overpower geopolitical rivals in becoming a destination for companies looking to leverage big data and machine learning.

And that’s where Disney comes in.

While Disney+ Hotstar isn’t available in China — operating a streaming service in the country is a privilege that is rarely, if ever, afforded to foreign firms — it has shown a keen interest in capitalizing on the country’s ambitious tech priorities. Investors across sectors have flocked to China, as in several areas the country has far exceeded expectations, particularly in technology. 

Big data analytics — processing and making sense of large amounts of information — is a key component of the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning fields. It’s also an industry that services like Hotstar stand to benefit from immensely. With a catalogue stretching from sports (IPL), original movies and shows, a deep regional film library and much more, data on what makes users spend more time on the platform may be invaluable to the company. 

Hotstar Beijing is currently hiring for 45 roles, effectively doubling its current headcount. From business-related roles like advertising, payments and subscriptions, to more technical roles like software engineering, Hotstar Beijing’s operations appear to cover a significant portion of the platform’s operations, going by the deliverables described on job listings published by Disney reviewed by Entrackr. Much of the roles require AI expertise.

Hotstar India paid NGC China Ltd, the former’s Beijing-based subsidiary, Rs 62.3 crore in 2020-21, which mostly constituted employee expenses; this translates to around 3.7% of Hotstar’s annual expenses in that fiscal year. The company doesn’t tout its presence in China too much, though, with all of its tech blog posts for instance being authored by developers working in India. 

India does not have a data protection law, so companies like Hotstar don’t have to disclose if they send user data to foreign companies. It’s unclear if there are any immediate risks from Hotstar user data being processed in Beijing. But the company has a record of being discouraged by strong privacy requirements — ever since the General Data Protection Regulation came into force in the European Union in 2018, Hotstar has remained unavailable in the region, until recently showing a message saying that it needed time to comply with the GDPR. (It did, however, launch in the United Kingdom, which has its own data protection law.)

Whatever the risks be, Hotstar’s under-emphasized operations in Beijing further a confluence of interests for Disney and the Chinese government: offering a relatively affordable talent pool for AI and machine learning roles, sifting through the gigantic trove of data generated by its 100 million users, and perhaps in a smaller way, creating demand for China’s state-sponsored push to become an AI superpower.