I am a big fan of Hotstar in India, and I have lots of people coming to read more about how they can watch Hotstar abroad every single day. For a long time, I have also had a working method described telling how to pay for and get a Hotstar Premium account abroad, but that is unfortunately not working anymore as of May 2019.
It hasn’t been easy to get a Hotstar Premium account in India earlier either. It has always required an Indian Payment card, and that has caused trouble for most people. But, we found a way to get around this and we described it in our article about how you can watch and pay for Hotstar abroad.
But, a few days ago Hotstar implemented a new tricky task that made it much harder to get a Hotstar Premium account abroad. What just happened?
You know need an Indian phone number as well to create a Hotstar Premium account in India
What is brand new as of May 2019 is that you also need an Indian cell phone number to create a Hotstar Premium account. That is really tricky because while you can get free online numbers for SMS verifications in all sorts of nations worldwide, Hotstar Premium doesn’t support those. You need an Indian number, and to actually get an Indian phone number you will need to register a phone number in India with name, address and so much more. It is not like many other nations in which you can simply buy a phone number on a gas station without giving any personal information, and thus Hotstar has probably made an end to the chance of signing up for a Hotstar Premium account abroad.
- The same is also true about SonyLIV, another Indian service also requiring an Indian mobile number.
If you already have a running Hotstar account, you can still use this to watch and pay for Hotstar Premium, but the real trouble will come if you haven’t created a Hotstar account yet. In other words, you might be lucky and have a Hotstar account. If that is you, you can still follow our instructions on which VPN to use to stream Hotstar abroad. If you haven’t gotten hold of a Hotstar account yet, you will probably have a hard time getting one because of the new mobile phone requirements.
What should you do about this?
If you cannot watch Hotstar abroad anymore, there isn’t a lot of things to do about it. You can, of course, try to find a service which will sell you a real Indian sim card, or maybe pay someone in India to let you create a Hotstar subscription using their cell phone number (you will for sure find some people on Twitter, Facebook, or different chat channels willing to do so for a couple of Dollars), but it is also risky, as they will have kind of control over the account if it is connected to their phone number.
If not, you better find a different place to stream the content online which you planned on streaming on Hotstar in India. There are lots of places where you can watch the Premier League online, stream the best HBO shows online, and so much more – so follow those instructions, and stream your favorite content online still, only not on Hotstar in India!
