How To Sign Up For Hotstar Or SonyLiv Outside India

If you’re looking to stream cricket or soccer online then Hotstar and SonyLiv should be the first websites you check. While they do stream some sport for free, a number of the football and cricket tournaments are only available on their paid premium services.

To sign up for either of these services we need to overcome 3 simple challenges:

  • Make our location appear to be in India
  • Receive an OTP by SMS to an Indian mobile number
  • Pay with an Indian payment source

As with all the other sport streaming websites we mention, you’ll need to have your Smart DNS Proxy setup first before accessing these sites.

Because these cricket streaming sites are in India we’ll also need to change our Smart DNS region settings. On the “My Account” page on the Smart DNS site you need to click on the “Regions” link.

Scroll down to the channel group options. For Hotstar you need to change Channel Group B to “India” and for SonyLiv both Channel Group B and Channel Group D need to be set to “India”.

(Note: If you want to watch sport on ESPN+ you’ll need to have Channel Group D set to “United States”)

Now we need to sign up for an account on SonyLiv and Hotstar.

To be able to sign up with either of these sites firstly you need to have an Indian mobile number. Part of the signup process requires you to enter a OTP (One Time Pin) number that gets sent via SMS.

For SonyLiv you only need the OTP when signing up. Thereafter you just sign in using your email and password or via your Facebook account.

For HotStar it gets trickier. Since they added Disney+ they now insist on the OTP when you sign up as well as each time you log in.

The other problem is that these sites only accept Indian credit cards or Indian payment processing options. You need to get someone in India to pay on your behalf.

Lucky for us there are a number of people on Fiverr that will do all of this for you. We’ve used this Fiverr service provider before and he is really professional.

He charges the $5 Fivrr fee, the Hotstar or SonyLiv Premium subscription and a little extra to cover foreign exchange, banking charges and the 20% Fiverr takes. It works out around R1,000 a year for SonyLiv and around R1,500 a year for HotStar.

Make sure that you sign up for the Premium service in both cases. For that you get plenty of sport and on Hotstar you get Disney+ too.

The Fiverr service provider handles the Indian telephone required and sends you the OTP when you sign up and sign in. For SonyLiv his basic Fiverr gig is fine because you only need the OTP once.

For Hotstar choose his standard gig so you secure a mobile number in case you need the OTP again to login. If you sign out of your Hotstar account by accident then you can message him on Fiverr and he sends you the OTP again.

We use these sites mainly to stream cricket and you’ll need both Hotstar and SonyLiv because they buy the rights to different cricket series. If South Africa is playing international cricket then one of those services will be streaming it.

There’s plenty of soccer like the UEFA series, they stream tennis and loads of other sport there too like Formula 1 and even Kabaddi. Never heard of that sport? Do yourself a favour and check it out.