The Best VPNs to Watch Hotstar Outside of India

Hotstar (now called Disney+ Hotstar) is a streaming service exclusive to India. It shows the English Premier League, Star Cricket Live, Formula 1, NFL, Bollywood movies, and much more.

To access Hotstar outside of India, you need a VPN that has Indian servers and consistently bypasses the service’s geo-restrictions. Otherwise, you’ll see this error notification:

“Hotstar content not available in your region.”

From the 61 VPNs we tested with Hotstar, only 3 VPNs are worth recommending. You can compare them in the table below, or keep reading to find a more detailed review:

Unfortunately, our research shows that if you do not have an Indian phone number there is no way to get the full premium version of Hotstar, even if you use a VPN.

Most websites ignore this fact, or suggest purchasing a virtual phone number or paying a third party. But there are other, safer ways to access Hotstar content.

That’s because, even if you don’t have access to an Indian phone number, you can still watch most Hotstar content through other streaming services.

Hotstar is owned by Disney, which distributes its Hotstar content to other regions through other streaming services it owns, such as Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu (all of these are available as the Disney Bundle package in the US). It also rents its content to services like Max and Tubi. A top VPN for streaming allows you to access all of these services from anywhere.

For example, popular Disney+ Hotstar titles like Bahut Hua Sammaan, Criminal Justice, City of Dreams, and Special Ops are all available if you have access to Hulu.

Our VPN research also shows that you can use a VPN to stream the IPL for free through Jio Cinema, access F1 for free through RTBF Auvio, and stream the English Premier League cheaply on Setanta Sports.

We maintain data on each VPN’s performance with every major international streaming service, so you can use the table below to see which VPN accesses the international streaming services that show Hotstar content:

ExpressVPN and PIA offer complete solutions to accessing Hotstar content. They enable you to access both the premium and free version of Hotstar India, alongside every other international streaming service that Hotstar content is also available on.

Based on our Hotstar-specific tests, most VPNs weren’t able to unblock the Indian streaming platform, including very popular names.

We’ve listed below some of the more notable VPNs that currently don’t unblock Hotstar India:

Hotspot Shield

Hotspot Shield can assign you an Indian IP address via a virtual server location. However, it did not work to access Hotstar from abroad in our tests.

NordVPN

Despite being an impressive VPN in most areas, our streaming tests show that NordVPN is unreliable at bypassing Hotstar’s geo-restrictions.

PureVPN

PureVPN’s India virtual server worked with Hotstar in our tests. However, the VPN’s long distance speeds aren’t as good as ExpressVPN’s or PIA’s. It also cannot unblock Hotstar content on Hulu.

To find the best VPN to watch Hotstar, we tested each VPN against the following criteria

Reliably Unblocks Hotstar (40%): We tested each VPN with Hotstar to check that it bypassed Hotstar geo-restrictions, allowing us to stream Hotstar outside of India.

India Server Locations (30%): Lots of India servers help to prevent server congestion and deliver optimal performance. It enables you to switch between servers if one isn’t currently working with Hotstar.

International Download Speeds (20%): Fast download speeds allows you to stream Hotstar in high resolution and without buffering. We collect download speed results from multiple international locations to determine each VPNs average international speed.

Streaming Device Compatibility (10%): VPN for Hotstar should be available as an easy-to-use app on various streaming devices, including Fire TV Stick and Apple TV. This enables you to stream Hotstar however you want.

The table below shows how each VPN scored in each testing category: