Hotstar Ads for India's biggest live-sports audience.

Hotstar (Disney+ Hotstar) is the single largest concentrated streaming audience event in India, with live cricket and marquee sporting events drawing simultaneous viewership that no other platform in the country matches, even briefly outpacing traditional TV during peak moments. That scale comes with a specific planning challenge: inventory during live sport is both the most valuable and the most contested, so media plans need to account for premium pricing during marquee windows versus the steadier, more efficient inventory available across Hotstar's broader entertainment and originals catalogue.

We plan Hotstar campaigns around both tiers deliberately — allocating budget to the high-reach live-sport windows for awareness-scale moments, and the steadier entertainment inventory for sustained, efficient reach the rest of the year. Household co-viewing (multiple people watching cricket on one screen) is also factored into reach and frequency modelling, since it materially changes effective audience size compared to single-viewer platforms.

The mistake we see brands make on Hotstar is concentrating an entire year's CTV budget into a short IPL window purely because it is the most talked-about inventory, without weighing whether that premium-priced spend actually outperforms a steadier, lower-cost presence across the rest of the entertainment calendar for their specific objective. Live-sport windows are genuinely excellent for mass-reach brand moments — a product launch, a major announcement — but for ongoing consideration-building or performance-oriented goals, the entertainment and originals inventory outside the cricket calendar often delivers better cost-efficiency with less competition for the same eyeballs. We model both scenarios against the actual campaign objective before recommending an allocation, rather than defaulting to "buy IPL because everyone buys IPL." The co-viewing dynamic is also frequently mismodelled — treating a Hotstar impression as reaching one person understates real audience reach during marquee cricket matches, where it is common for three or four household members to be watching together, which changes both the effective reach calculation and the creative approach, since a message landing with a whole room has different dynamics than one landing with a single isolated viewer.

This platform fits best for brands with a meaningful media budget looking for genuine mass-reach moments — live-sport windows especially carry premium CPMs that need enough overall spend to justify the planning effort. For smaller budgets, we often recommend starting with the steadier, more cost-efficient entertainment inventory or a different platform entirely, rather than stretching a limited budget too thin across premium live-sport windows.