IPL final sets new world record with over 1 crore live viewership on Hotstar

If cricket is religion in India then Indian Premier League (IPL) certainly is one of the biggest festivals for followers of the game. Last year, IPL had turned world’s most valuable sporting league in terms of title sponsorship with Chinese phone-maker Vivo won a bid for about $326 million (Rs 2,199 crore) for a five years contract.

The T20 focused format also makes a new world record as more than 10 million concurrent viewers logged onto the platform to watch the final fixture played between Chennai Super Kings and Sunrisers Hyderabad.

The 10 million concurrent viewership has broken the record of 8 million live viewership on YouTube when Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner had jumped from a helium balloon in the stratosphere in October 2012.

Meanwhile, about 34.2 million viewers tuned in to watch the Vivo IPL during the inaugural week between April 7 and 13 on Hotstar. According to a Hotstar report, it registered the aforementioned figures with a massive growth of 76 per cent versus last year.

Outrunning conglomerates including Facebook and Jio, Star India had won the television and digital broadcasting rights for five years period for a massive $2.4 billion (Rs 16,348 crore) in September 2017. To beef up its bandwidth and infrastructure to handle concurrent viewership, Star also had poured in $192 million in Hotstar around the same time.

Hotstar’s India Watch Report 2018 revealed that consumption of online videos has registered five-fold growth over the past one year. It claimed to be the most downloaded video app with 170 million installs.

Hotstar apps claim that the rate of its app download per minute in the country is higher than babies born. With 113 million views in just 8 hours, Champions Trophy Final 2017 (India vs. Pakistan) was one of the most globally watched online videos in the shortest span of time.

Unlike past (during 2012-16) when short format videos used to attract more eyeballs, viewership of long-form videos (exceeding 20 minutes) had driven 96 per cent of overall usage for Hotstar in last calendar year.

Indian online video industry is expected to touch $1.6 billion in revenue by 2022, from the estimated $340 million in 2017. According to KPMG, since the launch of Jio video streaming apps have witnessed a staggering 336 per cent rise in usage.