One of the biggest news in the cricketing world last year was the Star Sports winning the broadcasting rights of the IPL 2018 for a massive price of ₹16,347.5 crore. Most of the pundits criticized that Star will not be able to recover the amount in the tournament. One thing that the viewers were well aware of was that Hotstar will be the biggest gainer under Star Sports after the tournament and the testimony of the same would’ve been seen with the gradual increase in the number of viewers and in terms of revenue for Hotstar.
The first time that the streaming service went into the record books was during the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy final between India and Pakistan. Hotstar registered a record no. of users, at one point they registered n 4.8 million simultaneous viewers which were the highest viewership ratings in Asia-Pacific. In the 10th edition, over 130 million users had tuned in on Hotstar.
However, in 2018, the streaming service has broken all the possible records with 202 million viewers have logged on to the digital platform to watch the 11th season of the IPL, which is a 55.3% jump from last year.
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Talking about the numbers, the Chief Executive of Hotstar, Ajit Mohan said to LiveMint, “I believe that IPL XI has proved to be an inflection point for mobile as a platform becoming mainstream. The viewership numbers on Hotstar are a testimony that digital can be scaled like a mass media platform television.”
The final between the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and the Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) alone clocked in a record of 10.3 million viewers on Hotstar. The opening week of the tournament, the streaming platform got in 5.5 million viewers for the clash between the CSK and the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR).
On the 22nd May, it broke the previous record with 8.26 million watching the game between the Sunrisers Hyderabad and the Super Kings.
Speaking about Hotstar’s implementation of WatchN’Play and VR experience, Mohan concluded,“I believe social TV and gaming, which keep the viewer engaged, is the way forward for sports content online.”
