Now that Disney+Hotstar has lost its deal with HBO, here are the list of shows that won’t be available next month onwards and what led the streaming giant to take this decision in the first place!
As Indian audiences, we’ve always struggled quite a bit to watch International content. Earlier when there were no OTT platforms we had no option but to wait for its release in theaters (if they ever would) or wait for it to come on one of the English language channels, which of course would come a year after its initial release. With the blossoming of the OTT era, all of this slowly came to an end and international content, not just of English language but world cinema in general started becoming easily accessible to us. In recent years, Disney+Hotstar became insanely popular for bringing in exclusive international content. All of us remember during the final season of Game of Thrones back in 2019, the streaming platform premiered every episode at the same time as it aired in the US. Which not only made us feel included but at par with the rest of the world when it came to content. Since then we’ve enjoyed a plethora of award winning HBO shows like Big Little Lies, House of the Dragon, The White Lotus, Succession, Euphoria, and the most recent one being Pedro Pascal’s The Last of Us which has grabbed millions of views from around the world.
So it goes without saying that the news of Disney+Hotstar unfortunately having to discontinue all of HBO’s phenomenal content comes as a huge disappointment to its subscribers given that it was the major reason why people renewed their subscription every year. The news came to everyone’s knowledge when a subscriber enquired about the availability of Perry Mason season 2 to which Disney+Hotstar replied “Hi! Starting 31st March, HBO content will be unavailable on Disney+ Hotstar. You can continue enjoying Disney+ Hotstar’s vast library of content spanning over 100,000 hours of TV Shows and Movies in 10 languages and coverage of major global sporting events.”
The reason for this happening is Hotstar’s parent company, Walt Disney, is cutting costs in order to restructure and make its streaming service profitable. Recently, Disney+Hotstar also lost rights to two of the most popular sports in our current generation. Formula 1 and IPL as well. While IPL can still be watched on TV, Formula 1 is not something that fans like watching along with ads as often they have missed out on something major happening during the race due to Ad breaks and has forced them to buy expensive subscriptions of F1TV.
Amidst all of this, the audiences now ask the relevance of the streaming platform amongst its competitors and of course there were a plethora of memes on the situation, have a look!
If you too were an avid HBO content fan, Let us know your thoughts about this news in the comments below!
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