Watching TV, but not on TV

The highlight of television watching in 2016, for me, came towards the end of the year with two events.

First came the superbly made mini-series Mars, on National Geographic channel, which I watched not on television, but on the Hotstar app on my smartphone. Then in December, Amazon launched its Prime Video service in India.

Season 1 of Mars, a six-episode series, is considered by experts to be fairly scientifically accurate, presenting a mesmerising blend of today’s real science and an informed guesstimate of tomorrow’s possibilities, dramatised to the point of a gripping thriller. It is based on the book How We’ll Live On Mars by Stephen Petranek.

Hotstar is a video streaming platform that billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox launched in India in early 2015, via its Star network’s local subsidiary. Android app store Google Play shows that the smartphone app has been downloaded over 50 million times since.

Overall, Hotstar has 130 million users, Star India said recently in a press release, adding that the iOS version of the app has been rated as Apple TV’s app of the year for India in 2016.

Hotstar has a fair amount of free-to-watch content, but the real deal is the Rs 199 per month (at the time of writing) premium subscription, which allows me to watch Mars, or live cricket, or a host of other television series—Game of Thrones, for example. There are also a clutch of Hindi and regional-language channels, apart from Hollywood movies and HBO.

Amazon’s Prime Video was launched in December and those who had already availed the Amazon Prime subscription from the online shopping site—with an opening offer of Rs 499 a year—got to log in and watch away, addictively. Amazon also offered a 30-day trial period for new users. Even if Amazon hikes the subscription to Rs 999 a year, as some expect, it’s still a steal.

For folks who really must have some of the shows that aren’t on Hotstar or Prime Video, sure, go for Netflix, at about Rs 500 a month or higher, depending on what you want.

About that steal on Amazon, or Hotstar, there is one fly in the ointment, however—data. Streaming video entails data plans to access the internet, be it on broadband Wi-Fi at home or on cellular networks. My addictive watching of two seasons of The Good Wife on Prime Video back-to-back with Mars on Hotstar meant that my broadband provider ACT Fibernet had to prompt me that I’d exhausted my 60 GB limit for the month early, and I could choose to pay about Rs 470 for another 23 GB or so, based on some pro-rata calculations.

I was totally fine with that, but I’m just pointing out that watching all television on the internet, especially if one wants the paid content, involves the cost of subscription plus cost of data.

That, even as data costs might become a tad cheaper in 2017, might be a bit of a spoilsport. But hey, The Good Wife is so addictive. Just ask any of my friends.