At least 20 per cent of watch-time for Telugu movies comes from North and West India. While 30 per cent of show watchers in Tamil Nadu watch Hindi TV shows. These were some of the insights from Hotstar’s India Watch Report 2018.

Hotstar, the OTT arm of Star India, says affordable data charges is resulting in promising growth for it with close to 90 per cent of users preferring to watch content on mobile devices.

The company which shared data from its first India Watch Report 2018, a comprehensive analysis of what consumers watch on its platform suggest that an average user spends 2.5X more time watching content on mobile, than on web.

“It has been three years since we launched Hotstar. In more ways than one, the world has changed dramatically in those three years,” Hotstar CEO Ajit Mohan told BusinessLine.

Hotstar, launched in February 2015, is an online video streaming platform owned by Novi Digital Entertainment, a wholly owned subsidiary of Star India.It competes with the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos and other OTT players.

Stating that, “three years ago, most new data users would start with messaging, do text search, move on to social platforms and a few braves ones would watch video on the mobile network. This pyramid has been completely inverted. In a world that does not fear data charges, video is the first port of call for new data users”.

Citing the report, Mohan said: “At least 96 per cent of watch-time on Hotstar comes from videos longer than 20 minutes. Cheaper data has fueled explosion on the OTT platform”.

He said the company continues to invest both on technology and content.

Other insights from report point that the nation's most-watched genre is drama, and while West Bengal and Maharashtra can’t get enough of romance; Tamil Nadu and Delhi have a penchant for comedy.

International shows like Game of Thrones and Modern Family too been attracting significant traction in the online space, he added. While cricket especially IPL has been seeing a huge surge in online viewership, sports like football, badminton and kabaddi too has recorded growth in watch-time.