Sajith Sivanandan.
| Photo Credit: Bijoy Ghosh

The head of U.S. giant Disney’s Hotstar streaming app in India, Sajith Sivanandan, has resigned, three sources said on Thursday (October 24, 2024), as business integration gathers pace after the company’s $8.5 billion merger with Reliance’s India media assets.

The resignation comes days after an internal decision for all live sporting events of the merged entity, including the popular Indian Premier League (IPL), to be streamed on Disney’s Hotstar app, and not Reliance’s JioCinema.

That was the first major step in integration after the deal to create India’s biggest entertainment company.

However, the leadership has yet to decide if JioCinema will continue as a separate app, said two of the sources, who all spoke on condition of anonymity, as the discussions are private.

Mr. Sivanandan, Disney and Reliance did not respond to queries from Reuters.

After the merger, Disney and Reliance will together have more than 100 TV channels and two streaming apps, and will compete with Sony, Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Mr. Sivanandan worked at Hotstar for more than two years after working at Google for 15 years.

JioCinema is currently led by Kiran Mani, another former Google executive who has been associated with Reliance’s media unit for about a year.

Reliance’s JioCinema has the rights to IPL cricket, a money-spinner that is among the most-streamed content, as well as to the Winter Olympics and Indian Super League football.

Hotstar has rights to the International Cricket Council’s tournaments in India and English Premier League soccer.

This aerial photo taken on May 1, 2024 shows the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium in Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, New York, ahead of the ICC T20 World Cup 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

In a first for Indian sports streaming, the ICC Men’s T20 cricket World Cup will be streamed with Hindi audio description and Indian Sign Language (ISL) for visually and hearing impaired viewers, Disney+ Hotstar, the streaming service with the rights to stream the tournament this year announced on Wednesday. Reports peg the tournament’s media value between ₹1,600–2,000 crore. 

“Being the first OTT platform to introduce this feature for live cricket, we are democratizing the game … and have made this feature available for 10 matches, including India matches, semifinals and finals during the tournament,” Sajith Sivanandan, head of Disney+ Hotstar told The Hindu in response to an emailed questionnaire. 

Also read | ICC Twenty20 World Cup 2024: full schedule, dates and venues

While the ISL interpretation of commentary is new for streaming, Disney had streamed some matches of the Indian Premier League with a Hindi descriptive track in 2022. JioCinema, which owns the rights to the franchise now, does not have closed captioning, ISL interpretation or a descriptive audio track in any language. The ICC men’s ODI World Cup attracted a maximum of 5.9 crore concurrent viewers on Hotstar, a figure that is half of what pre-qualifier matches in the current season of the IPL are racking up online. 

Star Sports, which has IPL’s TV broadcast rights, announced similar accessibility features last month. “We aim to make our entertainment content accessible for the deaf, hard of hearing and visually impaired communities on VOD (video on demand) and live content over the next 12-18 months,” Mr. Sivanandan said. He added that most of upcoming Hotstar’s special programming will have closed captioning and audio description tracks — though such features for content licensed from studios remains inconsistent at best across streaming platforms. 

A review of accessibility features on streaming platforms in India by The Hindu last year found that most platforms have limited availability of same-language closed captioning or audio description for their content, with the steepest gap for films licensed from studios. 

The IT Rules, 2021 include a recommendation for streaming platforms to make their content accessible to differently abled users, but most work in this regard has been through the industry’s own practices, and the government has not visibly exerted pressure to facilitate accessibility on OTT platforms.