- Sunday, March 02, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
The broadcasting joint venture of Reliance Industries, India’s conglomerate led by the country’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, on Monday (3) said its JioCinema app witnessed a record 1.47 billion digital video views on the opening weekend of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament, besides 50 million mobile app downloads, Reuters reported.
It added that the number of video viewers for the IPL weekend broke the figures that were registered across the tournament’s entire previous season on digital, said Viacom18, a part of Network18, a media outlet owned by Reliance.
The 2023 edition of the T20 tournament kicked off at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat on Friday (31) with defending champions Gujarat Titans locking horns with Chennai Super Kings. Titans won the clash by five wickets.
Viacom18 won digital streaming rights from 2023 to 2027, for Rs 237.58 billion (£2.3 billion), which Disney held earlier.
The Disney-owned Star India, which is the official TV broadcaster of the IPL, the world’s richest cricket league, said it witnessed a total of 8.7 billion minutes of consumption on television for the opening game.
According to Viacom18, a peak attendance of 16 million viewers was recorded on JioCinema during the match.
The landscape for content consumption has increasingly moved “to digital and JioCinema performance this week is the biggest evidence of it,” Viacom18 Sports CEO Anil Jayaraj said in a statement, according to Reuters.
In a separate statement, Disney Star said that it was witnessing “continuing dominance” of linear television as the preferred platform for uninterrupted viewing of live cricket.
A total of five games were played in the ongoing edition of the IPL till the end of Sunday (2), its first weekend.
The tournament will be played till May 28.
