‘Since 2018, IPL’s TV viewership has grown by 40%’: JioStar Sports CEO Sanjog Gupta | Cricket News

JioStar Sports CEO Sanjog Gupta (L) was the visitor on first episode of Bombay Sport Exchange (BSE).

On March 22, because the 18th season of the Indian Premier League kicked off, the published bore the imprint of a tectonic shift in India’s media panorama. IPL, dubbed the “mother of all cricket leagues,” started airing beneath the “mother of all mergers” — a Rs 70,352 crore consolidation that fused Reliance’s Viacom18 and Disney’s Star India right into a single entity. The end result: a unified IPL broadcast expertise now housed beneath JioStar (TV) and JioHotstar (digital), a transfer that alerts the consolidation of energy and distribution within the palms of 1 media big.
The IPL continues to be a behemoth within the Indian sporting panorama. It has reworked right into a cultural spectacle, deeply embedded within the lives of hundreds of thousands of followers for over two months yearly.
Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!
“Since 2018, which is when we acquired the rights to IPL for Star at that time, on television viewership, it has grown close to 40%. Now for an evolved, mature property that the IPL already was in 2018, to grow as significantly as that shows two things,” mentioned JioStar Sports CEO Sanjog Gupta in dialog with Okay Shriniwas Rao, Head of Content (Sports), Times Internet, on the primary episode of Bombay Sport Exchange (BSE).
“One, that the property always had the immense potential to go from where it was to unseen heights. And two, it shows the potential of this market and the immense headroom for growth that the market has if you are willing to reimagine the possibilities. And that’s where this IPL journey for Star started with. And now it continues with JioStar where again the ambition is to continue on the growth trajectory and reach a billion viewers this year, duplicated,” he added.

At JioStar, the ambition with IPL 2025 is to achieve a billion viewers throughout TV, cell, and linked gadgets.
“After the merger, the property is across the JioStar network on linear, on mobile screens and on CTV. And what we want to achieve by the end of IPL is engage with a billion people across all our platforms, across the length and breadth of our programming, across the various hyper-personalised experiences that we are looking to offer and of course across the platforms where we are looking to recruit new audiences,” said Gupta.

Star Sports acquired the IPL rights in 2018 by spending Rs 16,347.50 crore throughout 5 seasons.
The rights have been retained in 2022 (for the 2023-27 cycle) with Disney Star spending Rs 23,575 crore for linear TV broadcast in India. The digital rights have been lapped up by Viacom18 for Rs 23,758 crore. It was the primary time the digital rights have been offered for the next worth than the linear TV rights.
Gupta, whose spectacular CV contains practically 15 years at Star TV Network, emphasised that regardless of the surge in digital consumption, tv stays a dominant power.

“Our ambition for growth across our linear platform which is Star Sports is just as ambitious as our ambition for growth on digital. It’s just that the headroom for growth on digital platforms by virtue of the sheer number of screens available for us to make the IPL accessible are far higher in the case of the mobile screens as compared to the living room devices,” said Gupta.
“If you think that India has about 250-270 million households devoted only about 150-260 million currently have a living room device which they can watch any content on. That’s the headroom for growth for all living room devices,” he mentioned on the episode.
JioStar’s formidable plans for IPL 2025 embody a panel of 170 specialists, together with cricket legends and celebrities. The protection options 25-plus feeds in 12 languages.
Beyond IPL, cricket’s greatest rivalries proceed to drive engagement. The Border-Gavaskar Trophy achieved a number of viewership information throughout 5 Tests in 2024-25, largely as a result of depth of the India-Australia contest, and never the format itself, mentioned Gupta on the present.
“Border-Gavaskar Trophy or the rivalry between India and Australia, I would say comes second only to the rivalry between India and Pakistan. The India-Australia rivalry now may not have the cultural significance or the historic significance that the India-Pakistan rivalry has. But in terms of a cricketing rivalry, it is definitely up there if not slightly ahead of the India-Pakistan rivalry,” mentioned Gupta.
Watch full episode: Sanjog Gupta, JioStar Sports CEO, in dialog with Okay Shriniwas Rao on the primary episode of Bombay Sport Exchange