Hotstar, owned by Novi Digital Entertainment, currently offers more than 50,000 hours of video content across 8 languages and is one of the major competitors to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in India.

In addition to the free content available on its platform, Hotstar offers two separate Premium plans — Hotstar Premium (INR 199/month or INR 999/year) and Hotstar VIP (INR 365/year) — exclusively for the Indian audience.

The Hotstar VIP plan gets you Live Sports streaming, new Indian movies, Hotstar Specials and several episodes of Indian TV. In addition to all that included in the VIP plan, Hotstar Premium also gets you several American shows, new Hollywood movies and an ad-free experience.

If you’re a Hotstar VIP or Hotstar Premium member and are facing video playback issues, we’ve got you covered in this article.

Related read: How many videos can be downloaded on Hotstar Premium and where are they saved?

What to do if a video on Hotstar doesn’t play?

Currently, only one Hotstar Premium content (video) can be played on a subscription.

• Cookies: If you’re getting an error while trying to play a video on Hotstar, make sure that your browser cookies are enabled.
• Subscription: Go to your ‘My Account‘ section and check your subscription status. It’s possible that it might have expired due to payment failure. You can also try to log in again using your credentials.
• Streaming: If you’re seeing an error that your Hotstar account is being used to play some other Premium video, you’ll need to check across your devices and see if the app is open with a video on any one of them. If so, close that video and refresh your current stream page.

Here are a few other things that worked for us when trying to resolve Hotstar errors, including: “Sorry, more than one premium videos is being requested from this account.”

• Refresh the page a few times.
• Clear browser cache since the last time Hotstar was accessed (A week in our case).
• Log out of the account and then log back in.

You can also email Hotstar at premium@hotstar.com if your issue isn’t resolved. All the company can do is clear the session from the back-end.

If you feel that someone is illegally using your Premium membership, share an alternate ID with Hotstar to get your subscription transferred to that ID. The subscription linked to your current email ID will be cancelled and anyone using that will be logged out automatically.

But before you do that, you should read on because our issue wasn’t resolved and we contacted Hotstar — might save you the trouble.

Also read: What is the Download Limit for Netflix and tips & tricks

So, we contacted Hotstar, but that didn’t help much

If you’re subscribed to Prime Videos or Netflix, it’s known that you can check out which devices are using your account currently and then de-register them or sign out of all devices, in case one of them isn’t yours or you just wish to refresh your device list. But the same isn’t true for Hotstar.

“Sorry, more than one premium video is being requested from this account. Please close other videos and try again”. If this is the error message that you see, you might find it interesting that you cannot check which devices are using your Premium account or sign out any that may be.

We got in touch with Hotstar and they told us that the company’s ‘Development team’ is working on a feature, similar to Netflix, to let a user log out of all devices at once.

“The issue (as shown in the screenshot above) happens in two scenarios: a) If the user shares his credentials with friends or family, and b) If the user logs into a public device/machines (like an internet cafe/office laptop used by multiple users) and someone else lands up on the page and uses it,” Hotstar told Candid.Technology.

“Our Development team is working on a feature to log out the account from all devices at the time of writing to you. Sadly, we cannot comment on exact timelines, but it should be available soon. Unfortunately, there is no provision to view the complete viewing history and the device and location where your account is being used.”

Why are you seeing this error?

Since this issue is widespread, we researched a bit and found out that scores of websites and videos on YouTube that are offering free Hotstar Premium cookies as well as free Hotstar Premium account and passwords.

Although Hotstar seems to have cracked down on a few websites and sent them legal notices, still numerous remain published and that’s causing hindrance in streaming for the legitimate Premium subscribers.

This goes to show that Hotstar doesn’t really have a secure environment to be running a paid streaming service. And also that users should change their passwords every now and then and keep a strong one so that their username and password doesn’t end up in one such list on a random website on the internet.

Also read: What it takes to be a YouTuber in 2019