Case Study: Hotstar achieves record 10.3M live concurrency and scales user engagement with CleverTap

How Hotstar Scaled User Engagement to Lead the Media and OTT App Market

Hotstar is a subscription-based OTT leader in India with a library of 50,000+ hours and 100M+ users that scaled rapidly amid fierce competition from global players. Its core challenge was twofold: convert huge, event-driven acquisition (especially sports viewers who often churn after events) into long-term engagement and subscriptions, and reliably deliver millions of timely, relevant messages during live events without losing relevance.

Hotstar tackled this with personalization at scale and real-time, omnichannel segmentation using tools like CleverTap (pivots, automated and live segmentation, flows, and cohorts). Targeted timing, behavior-driven recommendations, localized messaging and rich real-time pushes enabled measurable gains: a world-record 10.3M concurrent viewers, 100M+ push notifications delivered in minutes, a 3x CTR lift from optimized send times, reactivation of 8–10% of inactive users, a match campaign that brought 500k+ users back from a 51M send, Valentine’s campaigns with 12% engagement, and localized CTRs (e.g., 3.4% in Kerala).

Hotstar

Mihir Shah

VP of Product & Marketing Growth