India is a highly price sensitive market, like some other developing countries. If something is "free", it will win in India. Not that paid services cannot surv

India is a highly price sensitive market, like some other developing countries. If something is "free", it will win in India. Not that paid services cannot survive, but "free" will trump those by a huge margin. This just cannot be changed. But with higher disposable incomes and reducing mobile data charges (which still cost a lot on some providers), people are willing to spend a little on quality. Hotstar has a huge user base mainly because it offers a lot of content for "free", and this is something Netflix and Amazon don't do. If someone were to get the revenue numbers from paying subscribers, I'd bet on Hotstar being far behind the others. As someone who has used these three services, my ranking of Hotstar would put it way below Netflix and Prime Video. The Hotstar app is quite primitive and is probably two or three years behind Netflix. It doesn't even have lists, ratings, profiles, etc., leave alone features like skipping title screens and others. Hotstar is also restrictive for paying customers since it allows only one screen at a time. Like Prime Video, Hotstar is designed for individuals, not families. For a family of four, if they wanted Hotstar's paid content, it would cost the same as Netflix's highest tier. This is subjective, but it'd most likely be a poorer deal for many. Those who want high quality content and don't mind paying would go for Netflix. People also share subscriptions with their friends or family members to defray costs. Those who don't want to pay a lot would go with Amazon Prime. What Netflix and Amazon need to do to grow their subscriber base would be to license a lot of local content (the latter is doing well on that), like movies and TV serials in different languages. They should also look at providing English and other foreign language content voice dubbed in Indian languages. Hollywood movies have long been released in India in English and local languages. The same goes for many English shows too. Netflix and Amazon will hopefully figure things out, and I'm confident that Netflix is here to stay as the leader in quality on multiple fronts. The rest of the players may replace cable but remain ad supported (like 20 minutes of ads in an hour of content) and kill each other with their "free" and partially free offerings. They're more of a threat to each other than to these two behemoths.