John Oliver's hot take on Samsung wasn't shown in India for some reason

Nobody knows why.
 By 
Manish Singh
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

India's on-demand streaming service Hotstar, which bills itself as a no-censorship platform, edited out a segment from the Last Week Tonight show this week.

The show, hosted by John Oliver, had a segment about various Samsung products catching fire, a play on the unfortunate past few months that Samsung has had over the infamous Galaxy Note7 bursting into flames and some of its washing machines blowing up as well.

People who watched the show on Hotstar (the only available service that has license to air full episodes of the show in India), however, couldn’t catch the skit.

Inside sources at Hotstar noted that they weren’t aware of the editing. The company has since replaced the episode with its full-length counterpart that has the Samsung skit. A spokesperson at the company said an "inadvertent error" caused the segment to be clipped out from the episode.

We're told that the company reserves censorship only for critical issues that are in the interest of the nation, and it can’t think of a reason why a gadgets-centred segment would be removed.

"The editing of a small portion of an episode of the show was an inadvertent error and has since been rectified with the restoration of the content back online. We are putting in place specific protocols to avoid similar instances in the future," the spokesperson said.

Timely and unfettered release of content has been one of the prime factors for the boost of on-demand streaming services in India. Last year, Amazon Prime Video received backlash from viewers in India after certain segment from an episode of Jeremy Clarkson's The Grand Tour were not made available to Indians.

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Manish Singh

Manish Singh was a Mashable's senior correspondent in India. He has previously freelanced with CNET, NDTV Gadgets, BGR India, and MediaNama.

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