Disney+ Hotstar Powers Explosive Growth with Real-Time Event Streaming on Confluent Platform

Disney+ Hotstar is the largest OTT platform in India, with 300 million active users. The recent explosive growth of Disney+ Hotstar, which includes quadrupling its user base in a little over a year, has been driven by several factors. Increased smartphone penetration in the market and access to inexpensive data has helped. A larger factor is the platform’s content offering which includes not only live sports and events, but also original series as well as HBO and Disney content. Also among the biggest growth drivers are innovative features that let Disney+ Hotstar customers actively engage with the content and with each other in real time. During a live IPL telecast, for example, Disney+ Hotstar introduced a real-time cricket prediction game in which over 33 million unique users answered more than two billion questions—about 100K requests per second.

From a technology perspective, the company’s growth has been underpinned by real-time event streaming with Confluent Platform and Apache Kafka®. On an average day, 10 to 15 billion messages flow over Confluent Platform and Kafka, with peaks of up to five times higher. This event-driven architecture serves as a foundation for real-time analytics, increased customer engagement, enhanced customer experiences, and rapid, enterprise-wide growth.