The 2025 edition of the Indian Premier League will be a marquee event for JioStar, formed through the merger of Disney’s Star India and Reliance’s Viacom18.
And, with the new entity now having both the television and digital rights for the tournament, it aims to ‘engage’ with more than a hundred crore viewers.
“Our ambition around the IPL continues to be about growth. So we are aspiring to make this the biggest IPL ever – both in terms of viewership, as well as the business around IPL,” Sanjog Gupta, the CEO-Sports at Jio Star, told Sportstar.
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“The ambition is to be involved with a hundred crore viewers at different levels of engagement, which obviously means that we will look to recruit a large number of new viewers who had not involved with IPL last season. The idea is to continue with the growth agenda, continue to deepen the cultural linkages that IPL has with people’s daily lives and with the country at large, continue to put fans at the centre of this growth, which is to serve fans in meaningful ways across touch-points, be it device types or the different ways in which they consume (cricket),” Sanjog added.
And keeping that in mind, the brand is fashioning the IPL as a multi-modal, multi-platform experience.
“For the IPL 2025, we will have about 25 concurrent feeds being served across our platforms to different cohorts of fans,” Sanjog said, adding that the focus is also on growing the regional platforms.
“What started as a language foray in 2013 with the addition of Hindi, today is no longer just a language foray. It’s a language, region/culture, demographic, and to some extent, consumption-based reconstitution of what the broadcast experience used to look like,” he added.
Drawing reference to how each regional broadcast is different from the other, Sanjog said, “Let me just pick up how different Karnataka is to Tamil Nadu. Obviously, both states have deep affiliations for their teams. So, one point of differentiation between the two feeds that you will see is on the basis of how the home team affinity is expressed. Both states have two very different icons in Virat (Kohli) and (MS) Dhoni…
“The level of affiliation for an India player is very different. Virat is the second most popular player in Tamil Nadu and is the most popular in Karnataka and it’s the reverse for Dhoni. So, the way that this plays out on the feeds is also different,” he explained.
“Then there are the cultural linkages which are very different. Both states take immense pride in their culture and that culture always comes through in the feeds, both in terms of the programming on the regional sports networks that we have. Karnataka takes immense pride in the number of players from Karnataka who are representing various IPL teams, and we have also seen how Rajasthan Royals is a popular team in Karnataka because of Rahul Dravid.”
This time around, efforts have been taken to cater to the kids, too. “We are using two animated characters by the name of Motu and Patlu, who are very popular with kids, to present the IPL to kids in a very different way.”
“They will do commentary, host segments of various shows, they will have shows of their own, to basically bring alive the IPL narrative in a manner which an 8 to 12 year old can relate to, and actually enjoy watching.”
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After the ICC Champions Trophy broke viewership records in India with the historic final, the challenge of maintaining the tempo during the IPL in terms of viewership is not lost on the folks at JioStar.
“In case of the ICC events, at times the sentiments are governed by the sentiment around the Indian team and the Indian team’s performance. IPL tends to not be affected as much by the performance of players or teams and thus is a much more consistent offering in terms of the association irrespective of the results.”
“The sentiment or the associative value of the IPL doesn’t greatly depend on the performance of some teams or some players and thus the proposition is different.”
Despite round the clock cricket throughout the year, Sanjog doesn’t see it as an overdose of the game in terms of viewership. In fact, he sees it as an opportunity.
“We don’t see the availability of multiple cricketing events on the same platform as a challenge. We actually see it as a huge opportunity because suddenly consumers don’t have to access different platforms to watch that content. They can watch it on the same platform.”
“While 150 to 160 million homes in this country have living room devices, there are about 230 to 240 million homes. That means the way that we look at it is that there are 60 to 80 million homes that don’t have living room devices that they can watch live sport on. And this then presents the headroom.
“There are about 650 million smartphones, another 200 odd million feature phones. Most of them have some access to connectivity and that then becomes the universe that we are trying to cater to. And if we look at our current levels of digital reach, we still have a long way to go before we saturate that universe,” he said.
So, that creates an opportunity. “So, both on big screen viewing and on mobile viewing, we see there being enough and more headroom for growth over the next two, three editions. And that’s really what IPL can power. There is no bigger recruiter of new audiences than live cricket in this country and particularly IPL,” he stated.