Hotstar Premium prices increased due to IPL 2019 and Game of Thrones, now starts at Rs 299

Hotstar India has announced new pricing for its popular media streaming app. The Hotstar Premium subscription plan now costs Rs. 299 per month. It is a straight Rs. 100 hike on the earlier Rs. 199 per month pack. However, the annual plan and the recently introduced Hotstar VIP plan have the same price tags.

The company has already updated its webpage as well as the iOS/Android apps in order to show the new pricing. According to a recent report, the newly announced Disney streaming service, Disney+, will be available via Hotstar in India. Notably, Disney recently became the official owner of Hotstar.

However, it is still unclear if the new pricing is applicable to new subscribers or to the existing subscribers as well. If it is for existing subscribers, then they will need to pay Rs. 299 per month instead of Rs. 199 from their next billing cycle.

To sum it up, the cheapest Hotstar plan one can get now costs Rs. 299 per month and brings all the premium features. However, if a user wants to go even cheaper, they can opt-in for the company's recently released Hotstar VIP Plan, which does not bring any American shows or Hollywood movies and costs just Rs. 365 annually. For those who think Rs. 299 per month costs way too much for the premium features, can pay an annual fee of Rs. 999.

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Meanwhile, Mint has reported that the content created for the new Disney+ streaming service will be made available on Hotstar in India. This also means that Disney has no plans of launching Disney+ as a standalone streaming service in India. The report further claims that Hotstar has plans to localise the Disney+ content for India by adding dubbed versions or adding subtitles for regional languages.