Charge of the Mobile Brigade

From being a TV spectacle for over a decade, the IPL is now a prized catch for all digital stakeholders—from streaming platforms to advertisers and viewers

 almost nothing captures India’s changing entertainment viewership patterns in the way the Indian Premier League (IPL) does. Since its inception in 2008, the wildly successful cricket league—the world’s second-most expensive sports league after America’s NFL—has been a centrepiece event for broadcasters. First on Sony Entertainment Television and later, on Star Sports, IPL has driven a lion’s share of the annual revenues of sports channels. But ‘the times they are a-changin’.

With the proliferation of the internet, IPL’s TV viewership has been on a steady decline, especially post the Covid-19 pandemic. After peaking in 2019 with 460 million TV viewers, IPL saw its viewership slide from 400 million in 2020 to 267 million in 2021 to 220 million last year. In 2023, it could drop even further.

The ongoing 16th edition of IPL is being telecast and streamed by two separate media networks, one eating into the other’s ad-rev pie as well as the user base. RIL-backed JioCinema, the latest entrant in the sports streaming arena, expects 523 million viewers to tune into IPL digitally and has roped in more than 500 advertisers for its platform. These include both legacy brands like Castrol, TVS, Oreo, UltraTech Cement, etc., that are slowly moving their ad spends from TV to digital, as well as digital-first brands like Dream11, JioMart, PhonePe, Amazon, Rapido, RuPay, etc. With a roster like that, JioCinema is expected to significantly dent Star Sports’ ad sales.

A report by Media Partners Asia (MPA) projects that JioCinema will grab over 60 per cent of IPL 2023’s total ad sales and digital ad revenues will surpass TV ad revenues for the first time in the history of the tournament. While Star Sports’ ad sales could be around $200-220 million, JioCinema’s ad sales are projected to cross $330-350 million, say analysts.

“Star has struggled to withstand Jio’s onslaught as well as the challenging macroeconomic environment. As a result, pay-TV ad sales will more than halve year-on-year to $200-220 million with a downside case stretching to below $200 million,” MPA stated in its report.

Besides streaming, IPL has also birthed a thriving fantasy gaming industry that is growing bigger by the day. The gross revenue of fantasy sports in IPL 2023 is expected to reach `2,900-3,100 crore, with nearly two-thirds of transacting users coming from India’s Tier II+ cities, states a report from Redseer.