It was a big day for Hotstar when Disney+ made it to India, bringing some sweeping changes to its interface and content catalog. But a year on, the app hasn’t made the kind of strides that people were hoping for. Across platforms, Hotstar lacks many features that you’d consider essential for a streaming service. And it’s a real shame considering the Disney+ app available in the US scores much better on most of those fronts. We closely compared the Hotstar and Disney+ apps so that when you catch up on the latest Hawkeye episode this weekend, you’ll know exactly what you’re missing on Hotstar versus Disney+.
Multi-user profiles
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Hotstar sorely lacks the support for multiple user profiles, even though the users have been petitioning for it quite literally for years. Without individual profiles, other users often taint your continue-watching list and recommendations with those intolerable saas-bahu serials, which is especially troubling for those sharing their Hotstar accounts with their family and friends.
Disney+, on the other hand, has a pretty decent profile system, like you’ve seen on Netflix and Prime Video, allowing you to enable up to six profiles, including kid-friendly ones with a cleaner interface.
Limited 4K and HDR support
Up until just a couple of years ago, the maximum resolution Hotstar supported was 720p. But thankfully, things advanced quickly after the Disney takeover, bringing not just Full HD but also 4K and HDR content to Hotstar. However, the catalog still remains pretty small as compared to Disney+ in the US. Newer movies and TV shows from Marvel and Disney (and even some local content) are readily available in 4K HDR now, but it’s some of the older movies like Aladdin, Guardians of the Galaxy (both 1 and 2), Toy Story 3, and many more that are capped at 1080p.
What’s far more ridiculous is that Hotstar officially supports 4K and HDR playback only on Android TV, Fire TV, and Apple TV devices, leaving out a big chunk of 4K-capable Samsung and LG TVs (though some users started seeing the option very recently). So, your flashy new LG OLED TV can’t stream Hotstar content in 4K unless you pick up a streaming dongle that supports 4K and Dolby Vision. That also means your Android phone cannot play the HDR content on Hotstar, even though the Netflix app has had the capability for a while.
Playback quality
When you’ve got hundreds of millions of active users to cater, service availability takes precedence over playback quality, and that’s exactly what’s been happening with Hotstar for some time. Even if you’re connected to Wi-Fi and have the highest possible video quality selected, you’ll still see a lot of artifacts on the mobile screen — something you usually only see on a stream heavily compressed to let it play nicely on a poor 4G connection. And it’s even worse when you cast something to a Chromecast; it’s like watching a 480p YouTube video stretched to fill a big TV screen.
Thankfully, the playback quality is miles better on Hotstar’s Android TV app, where it maintained a respectable bitrate of close to 4Mbps for a 1080p stream. However, the app does take a while to reach the maximum resolution and bitrate, so you may have to put up with low-res content while starting or scrubbing through a video. It goes without saying that none of this was an issue with Disney+ in the US.
Player screen
The video player interface on both the Indian and American Disney+ apps are pretty barebones, giving you some basic options like picking audio and subtitle languages. However, I do wish Hotstar enables the skip intro button for more shows than just the new Marvel ones, saving me from having to clumsily click the forward button several times when watching The Simpsons. A bigger pet peeve for Hotstar users has been the Disney+/Hotstar watermark and the minuscule star icon from Hotstar’s olden days that stick around throughout the video.
Besides that, Disney+ introduced its co-watching feature called GroupWatch last year. You might’ve guessed that it hasn’t made it to the Indian app so far, but I’m sure folks here will appreciate having the option to hold virtual group-watching sessions.
First: Hotstar, Second: Disney+.
Aspect ratio
Hotstar has been notorious for cropping some older Marvel movies to fit the more conventional 16:9 aspect ratio, losing significant portions of the scenes on either side. While things have improved on that front lately, some problems with the content’s aspect ratio remain. The Simpsons, for example, streams on Hotstar in its remastered 16:9 format instead of the original 4:3. Those using Disney+ in the US have a toggle to switch to the original format, but there’s no such option on Hotstar, forcing people here to miss out on many of the visual quips in the classic sitcom.
Disney+ recently announced to make over a dozen Marvel films in the IMAX ratio. So far, only Shang Chi has been made available in the taller format on Hotstar, though that too comes with a few (rather absurd) caveats. The film will fall back to the widescreen cinematic aspect ratio on a 4K-enabled device, so you must be on a platform that only supports FHD playback to see the IMAX version of the film — casting can also do the trick. A more minor issue is that Hotstar has no indication like the “IMAX Enhanced” badge on Disney+.
Premier Access
When Black Widow started streaming on Disney+ under Premier Access a few months ahead of its release on Hotstar, many Marvel fans in India cried foul about its local unavailability — a few even signed a petition to bring Premier Access to India. While the whole rental and VoD model may not be well suited for the Indian market (not to forget the prohibitively high prices for Premier Access), it was made abundantly clear that any release delay in India doesn’t go down well with the Indian Marvel clan.
While we point out all the features Hotstar is missing, it must also be said that its subscription tiers start at just ₹499 (~$7) and go up to ₹1,499 (~$20) for the plan with all the bells and whistles — and those are annual prices. Compared to Disney Plus’ $80 yearly price, Hotstar is a bargain, while still giving you most of the Disney+ content and then some.
On top of that, the app has been the destination for cricket lovers in India. In fact, it holds a record for supporting over 25 million concurrent streams during a World Cup semi-final match in 2019 — without breaking a sweat! Hotstar’s other strong suit is the variety of content it offers that goes beyond Disney’s own extensive catalog, with HBO shows playing a major role. The app even accommodates speakers of different Indic languages, with localized dubs and subtitles being made available from day one, even for Disney Plus’ new Marvel TV series — all this at a pretty reasonable price.
After Hotstar’s merger with Disney+, the hopes for a better user experience went high. While it’s still got some fine-tuning to do, we hope that Hotstar is working on addressing the user feedback sooner rather than later.
Prasham Parikh contributed the Disney+ US findings to this story.