Digital allows to scale and provides branding and targeting, hence it is a complete package, Anil Jayaraj, Viacom18

This season there was a disruptive digital IPL experience. The 2023 edition IPL action on and off the pitch kept people stumped. One could barely keep up with the viewership records broken during the league. The great digital leap set this season apart – IPL streamed free in many regional languages with a certain degree of interactivity at its core. Infact JioCinema , official streamer of IPL witnessed highest ever peak concurrency globally at 3.21 crore. It amassed mindboggling 700 crore plus video views over the season and reached over 12 crore unique viewers. The platform itself 2.5 crore app downloads in a single day. Digital IPL democratized for advertisers.

Anil Jayaraj CEO, Sports, Viacom18 says. “ IPL final had 12.2 crore people coming in. 3.2 crores of them concurrently – that is a testament to the technology that JioCinema incorporated. Over 800 advertisers also came on board. The scale of production and content was massive– 17 feeds, 12 languages out of which many languages were there for the first time.”

Jayaraj adds, “Our focus was on ensuring that there is no barrier to consumption on account of affordability and languages."

When it comes to viewership, Jayaraj talks about some learnings. “60 minutes per consumer watching IPL on digital was a major milestone for us. Another big learning was if you provide content in the language or the cohort consumers typically love, there is much greater chance of people watching for longer.”

Jiocinema offered 17 simultaneous feeds in 12 languages. Apart from conventional South Indian languages, languages like Bhojpuri and Punjabi were severely under indexed. “Research suggested people want to consume in those languages. Languages are not the only way people want to consume, they want to consume with group of friends. Many young urban women were probably underindexed, or people who were keen to have slightly lighter view on how cricket goes on, so there was Insider feed for them,” mentions Jayaraj.

Addressing JioCInema’s decision to dedicate a feed to female viewership Jayaraj states that people consume content in the way that appeals to them. He says, “We were trying to change lexicon and grammar with certain cohorts.” Even advertisers had a lot to gain from this digital IPL. The fact that as a consumer sitting at home people can choose which camera angle they want and think of themselves sitting in the stadium or dugout appeals to a lot of advertisers on how different and personalized the whole digital experience is.

Digitlal IPL democratised advertising for a lot of first time advertisers. With digital advertising people can measure after targeting and decide the call to action. “Digital allows to scale and provides branding and targeting, hence it is a complete package,” says Jayaraj and adds “Television doesn’t give you opportunity to get lots of advertisers to participate. What digital does is it gives anybody the opportunity to come and participate and reach people. One can choose their budget and choose the number of people they want to reach. It’s very targetable.”

CTV has been a big part of JioCinema’s success this season. “We had over 12 and a half crore people tuning into CTVs. We think it will keep going up because a significantly large percentage of TVs sold now are smart tvs. Also, in smaller towns, the tendency of lot of people is to hook up your mobile to televisions and make a quasi connected TV." concludes Jayaraj.