Rain delays and a truncated match failed to deter cricket fans from tuning in to the final clash of the Indian Premier League (IPL) on Monday. The match between Gujarat Titans and Chennai Super Kings saw JioCinema reach concurrent viewership of a record 32 million.
This was the highest-ever digital viewership for the season and the fifth time this record was broken during the tournament this year, JioCinema, part of the Viacom18 network, said.
Concurrency records were previously shattered on April 12 (22 million), April 17 (24 million), May 24 (25 million) and May 26 (25 million), JioCinema said.
JioCinema is the digital broadcaster of the IPL for the 2023-27 period and streamed the IPL for free this year. The move led to heightened curiosity, downloads and advertiser interest, sector experts said, with the first weekend itself seeing 1.47 billion video views on the platform and new app downloads pegged at 50 million
Television also added new viewers, as per data from the Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC).
While BARC data for the final match will come with a lag, numbers until last week show that TV viewership also shattered records. As many as 482 million TV viewers had tuned in to watch the first 66 matches of the T20 tournament, the highest-ever reach for any edition of the tournament, Disney Star, the TV broadcaster of IPL for the 2023-27 period said, quoting BARC data.
Total TV consumption for the tournament for the first 66 matches on the Disney Star network stood at 360 billion minutes, the broadcaster said. This was against over 13 billion video views for JioCinema in the first five weeks of the tournament, with viewers spending an average time of 60 minutes per match on the digital platform during the period.
“JioCinema continues to grow from strength to strength. It is based on clear evidence of consumer’s outright preference of catching the IPL on digital,” Viacom18 Sports CEO Anil Jayaraj said.
Media experts said the IPL this year has added new viewers on both digital and television.
Sajal Gupta, chief executive officer at Gurugram-based Kiaos Marketing, said, “While the fear earlier was that the split in IPL viewership would be detrimental to the media ecosystem, the two broadcasters have actually managed to grow the viewer base thanks to aggressive marketing and programming initiatives.”
Prior to IPL 2023, the TV reach of of the tournament was 300-400 million viewers, sector experts said. This year, according to Gupta, that number has been breached. Total TV reach after taking into account the playoffs and final match would be closer to 550 million, he said.
In terms of advertising, media experts expect this year’s tournament to fetch revenue in the region of Rs 5,000 crore, across TV and digital. While digital is a growing medium, TV, they said, may walk away with the lion’s share of the advertising pie given that the ad rates are higher on the medium versus digital.
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