5 days ago
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ARTICLE AD BOX
Opening thoughts. An email from JioHotstar landed in my mailbox this week. I was expecting the subscription to take an inflationary direction, neatly packaged behind the main talk point which was the launch of monthly subscription packs for the streaming service. And that is exactly how it is — applicable January 28. The Premium subscription (this is top-tier in the troika that includes Mobile and Super) sees its annual cost now at ₹2,199 — that’s up from ₹1,499. The new structure now means Mobile costs ₹79 per week, ₹149 for a quarter and ₹499 per year, Super will cost ₹149/ ₹349/ ₹1,099 while Premium is now priced at ₹299/ ₹699/ ₹2,199. Top tip: if you want to stick to the current prices, select a plan now and enable auto-renewal.
Interesting enough, and this seems to be an Amazon Prime Video inspiration, is a new Hollywood Add-on pack for the Mobile tier only, which means an additional ₹49/ ₹129/ ₹399 depending on the base subscription tenure. Amazon recently added an ad-free tier that’s priced at ₹699 per year, on top of the Prime Annual subscription that costs ₹1,499. If you think each of these costs are “just a slight increase”, I’ve a bridge to sell to you. Here’s a snapshot of your annual monetary outlay — ₹2,199 for Hotstar Premium, ₹2,198 for an ad-free Amazon Prime Video, ₹5,988 for Netflix’s 1080p plan or ₹7,788 for the Netflix 4K plan, and ₹1,499 per year for the individual YouTube Premium plan or ₹3,588 for the family bundle. There would be more too, in your case. It all totals up. Think again. In the end, all I’ll say specifically for JioHotstar is, this higher subscription price should be accompanied by smoother frame rates for live cricket streams. It is only fair to ask.
EDITOR’S MARGIN: YOUR PC MAY SOON NO LONGER BE YOUR PC
Jeff Bezos has been undoubtedly wrong many times with more than one prediction, but the two things he foresaw before pretty much everyone else were online retail and the concept of cloud computing, the latter a big revenue generator as it turns out. Considering the fact that the AI bros are still holding a bowl that’s barely filled with pennies, they of course want you to part with as much cash as you can to keep the circular AI economy afloat. That brings me to Microsoft’s direction with Windows PC, which seems to be heading in one direction — put everything in a subscription package. The reason why I’m saying this is, at the 2026 New York Times DealBook Summit this month, Bezos called AI a “horizontal layer” and that it can be “used to improve everything” — very little proof of the latter, but I’ll indulge.
Jeff Bezos has again used this specific "electric generator" analogy (been doing it for years to describe the transition to cloud computing; first famously in his 2003 TED Talk), recalling seeing a 100-year-old generator in a Luxembourg brewery’s museum and realising it was a relic of a time before a power grid existed. In that era, if a brewery or a hotel wanted electricity, they had to build and maintain their own power plant. Bezos connects this to modern computing.
- Antiquated Local Hardware: He correlates this to modern day computing, and specifically talks about everyone having their own data centre. “That’s not going to last, and it makes no sense”, he says. That also was the thought behind AWS, or Amazon Web Services, all those years ago. That’s the first call for a centralised utility.
- "Compute off the Grid": He argues that just as businesses eventually stopped making their own power and started buying electricity from a grid, they will stop owning hardware and instead "buy compute off the grid" through services like AWS.
Tech companies are often quick to point out that local hardware often sits idle, wasting energy and resources, whereas a centralised cloud can shift that power to whoever needs it in real-time. That brings me to Microsoft, and I’ll admit having tried my best to understand their Windows 11’s consumer trajectory in the largest dosage of good faith, and I keep reaching the same point with every attempt. Microsoft is plastering Windows 11 with the Copilot AI button, irrespective of whether anyone has asked or not. The play here is, to get you so dependent on AI, that you’d eventually pay for one of the premium subscription tiers with higher usage limits and more capabilities unlocked. The basic package won’t cut it anymore.
Microsoft is actively marketing Copilot, which is underlined by OpenAI’s models by the way, to make a case for “Copilot PCs” and “AI PCs”. So much so, pretty much every app beyond the start menu, has that Copilot icon staring you in the face— the Microsoft 365 Copilot apps including Word and Excel, Edge, Outlook, Paint, even Notepad. Perhaps social media got it right for once, with “Microslop”.
Back to the original point. Local PC hardware, the way things are shaping up, will face a forced sense of being antiquated, sooner rather than later. That’s where the museum and generator example becomes relevant — consumers will also be forced to do what businesses already do — that is rented, always-online cloud computing. The spiking prices of storage and memory, a trajectory that’s expected to continue in 2026, lends credence to this depressing progression. All you’ll eventually own is perhaps a display, a keyboard and a mouse or trackpad. Windows will load remotely, as part of a subscription. They first moved our music to streaming. Then the TV shows used a streaming methodology. And if you’re interested, games too. But this will impact a much wider set of users. The answer may reside in the cloud, uncomfortably so.
ANALYSIS: MICROSOFT’S DOWNWARD SPIRAL
Over the last two months — and in this time, CEO Satya Nadella was also in India talking up AI’s prospects and investments over a multi-year period — Microsoft’s stock is down around 10%. The reasons are many. Questions are finally being asked about the company’s insistence on wrapping everything with the Copilot AI layer including Windows 11 and the Office apps, a a record-breaking $35 billion data centre infrastructure investment in Q1 2026 with returns still anyone’s guess, and also the company’s five-point “Community First” AI data centre plan that has been roundly met with skepticism online (in the same way as when Microsoft said they’ll make Windows into an “agentic OS”.
There is also the “Microslop” trend doing the rounds on social media, as the very quality of experience of Microsoft’s core Windows apps has dived with the forced Copilot integration. Not to forget every time OpenAI has a less than perfect day at work, it impacts Microsoft too — so neatly intertwined are their fortunes, considering Copilot’s backbone are OpenAI’s GPT models. Oh, remember the Windows January update which didn’t let millions of PCs turn off? Microsoft has had to hurriedly release a fix — perhaps a recognition that the ability to turn off your computer is indeed a necessary feature.
SECOND THOUGHTS: THE MEMORY SAGA
It is being estimated that AI datacenters will corner as much as 70% of the available high-end DRAM (that’s Dynamic Random Access Memory used in PCs and more electronics) production through 2026. In case you’ve been keeping tabs, you’d recall memory prices are already up by about 50% in the last three months of 2025. The trajectory is expected to remain the same, with TrendForce estimates suggesting these prices will rise a further 70% this year. Research firm IDC has already warned us that the PC market will be volatile in the next 12 months, and the PC market could shrink by as much as 9%. I am most interested in how the memory shortage impacts the smartphone space eventually, because it’ll have a major bearing on the affordable and mid-range phones.
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