Viacom18-owned The IPL 2023 official streamer, JioCinema, had a record-breaking opening weekend, racking up 147 crore video views over the course of three days. According to the site, this is more viewers than watched the entire IPL 2022 season online, which was broadcast on Disney+ Hotstar. “The first weekend alone saw more video viewers on JioCinema than the entire previous season of the TATA IPL on digital platforms combined. According to JioCinema, this number was also higher than that of the ICC T20 World Cup in 2022.
JioCinema recorded a peak concurrent audience of 1.6 crore people for the season-opening match between the Chennai Super Kings and the reigning champion Gujarat Titans. More than 2.5 billion app downloads were also recorded in a single day. Ten crore people saw the show for the first time overall on the first weekend, and five crore people downloaded new apps. The company claims that fans “continued to gobble up unique features like 4K feed, 12-language coverage, 16 distinct feeds, hype mode, and Multicam setup, among others.”
Notwithstanding initial software bugs that were noticed by a number of users, the average amount of time per viewer per match reached 57 minutes. This is an increase of 60% from the first weekend of the previous season on Hotstar.
These numbers are exceptional and indicative of the digital transformation sweeping the country,” said Anil Jayaraj, CEO of Viacom18 Sports. Digital is interactive, addressable, and can be targeted. In contrast to legacy services, digital measurement is based on the precise number of viewers rather than on subjective extrapolation from a limited sample set.
JioCinema has introduced free match streaming for IPL 2023 in local tongues like Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Odiya, and Gujarati. Moreover, there are streams available in English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada. “What we saw during IPL 2023’s inaugural weekend is a testimony of the faith people have shown in JioCinema’s initiatives to make the league more accessible, inexpensive, and in distinctive first-time cricket broadcast languages,” Jayaraj continued.
This IPL season, JioCinema is anticipated to account for over 60% of ad revenues due to the interest it has attracted from advertisers (with the remaining going to TV). JioCinema has partnered with over 20 brands from a variety of consumer markets. These companies include Dream11, JioMart, PhonePe, Amazon, Rapido, RuPay, Tiago EV, Appy Fizz, ET Money, Castrol, TVS, Oreo, Bingo, Sting, AJIO, Haier, Louis Philippe Jeans, Ultra Tech Cement, Puma, Kamla Pasand, Kingfisher Power Soda, and Jindal Panther TMT Rebar.
