Back at the launch event of its flagship Xiaomi Mi LED TV 4, the company stated that it's working hard to add more content services on board. And today, Xiaomi announced that India's leading online streaming platform, Hotstar is making its way to the Mi LED TV. Xiaomi made this announcement via a blog post on Mi Community. Users with any of the Mi TV can find the Hotstar app in More Apps section. However, Xiaomi did not announce any Hotstar subscription deals for the Mi TV owners though, meaning users with premium Hotstar membership can watch the content, while others can enjoy free Hotstar services.
For the unaware, Xiaomi's Mi TVs run PatchWall interface in India, which is based on Android and is a heavily skinned UI. Xiaomi has worked on this interface for years now, and it offers content from various service providers such as Sony LIV, ALTBalaji and so on. However, the only drawback was the absence of big content players such as Hotstar, Amazon Prime Video and Netflix.
That said, Hotstar has now made its way to the Mi LED TV, while there's no word on the other two. With online content consumption increasing every passing day, it would be great if Xiaomi brings the other two services to the platform. A recent report said that a staggering 70% of Netflix content is being watched on television itself. This is pretty much enough to explain the scenario of what's going on currently.
There are some ways to sideload Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to the platform, but that 'official support' word feels so good that we don't have to go through the hassle of sideloading services.
Right after hearing this news, we fired up the Hotstar application on our Mi TV 4A 43-inch model, and it's working absolutely fine without any issues. Of course, there are some downsides that you can't adjust the streaming quality of the content, but hopefully, Xiaomi adds these features to the platform very soon.
