Disney Star rides the IPL wave with a key playbook to get into more Indian homes

While Star Sports was present in eight out of 10 paid TV homes before the IPL, the broadcaster added 11 million more paid subscribers in the first 25 days of IPL and is now present in nine out of 10 paid TV homes in India, Gurjeev Singh Kapoor, Head – Distribution and International – Disney Star, told ET Online.

“We collaborated deeply with our partners with the mission to take Star Sports to every household in the country. We worked out on a three-pronged strategy where we collaborated with our affiliate partners, offered value packs and had commentary in multiple regional languages” he said.

Read the full interview: Star Sports is now present in 9 out of 10 pay TV homes driven by the IPL fever

Disney Star is locked in a tussle this year with Viacom18 that won digital rights for the world’s second-richest league. The strategies were crucial to ramp up viewership on TV and on its network, which they call the ‘home of sports’.

The broadcaster said its offering of value packs, where sports content is also curated with other popular channels, was taken up by people as it provides a complete wholesome entertainment for the entire family.”Not only that, we were mindful that you would have a new set of customers coming in, so we needed to ensure that we engage with them in a very meaningful and innovative manner,” Kapoor said.The broadcaster also launched interactive features on TV sets, allowing viewers to watch match highlights at any time, fix cameras on their favorite stars or get real-time subtitles of commentary at the click of a button.

Disney Star also broadcast some IPL clashes on their free-to-air channel Star Utsav Movies, an “innovative” strategy which the company said attracted new customers.

“There is an audience on Free Dish who did not get to view IPL in the past and this strategy was to give an opportunity for the viewers on Free Dish to sample IPL. BARC estimates the Free Dish viewers to be about 42 million. We built a narrative and a campaign where we encouraged people to move from Free to Pay TV by just paying Rs 19 for Star Sports 1; and this really worked for us,” Kapoor said.

Last week, Disney Star said it has taken just 29 matches of this year’s edition of the cricket league to break the TV viewership record set in the whole of the 2022 edition. In 29 matches, the TV viewership hit over 40 crore, while it recorded a growth of nearly 24% in television viewership ratings (TVR) in comparison to the last edition, according to BARC data.

However, this comes at a time when Disney Star is in a viewership battle with a digital platform streaming the matches for free.

IPL rivalries on the ground have been a talking point for ages and Virat Kohli recently got into a heated argument with his former Indian teammate Gambhir, showcasing the intense nature of the tournament where cricketers are auctioned and they play for franchises representing different Indian cities.

“It is commendable that despite having free digital access, TV remains a popular and competitive medium for sports,” said Utkarsh Sinha, managing director at tech and media advisory firm Bexley Advisors. “Star’s record viewership numbers for IPL so far are a strong indicator both of the popularity of IPL and the preference many consumers still have for televisions as a medium for consuming sports content, where the community viewership aspect is meaningful.”

The Board of Control for Cricket in India had set up a rivalry outside the ground starting this IPL between Disney Star and Mukesh Ambani’s flagship OTT platform JioCinema after it split the TV and digital rights of IPL from 2023-2027 to eventually garner a whopping Rs 48,390 crore in total.

Disney Star bagged the TV rights for Rs 23,575 crore and Reliance-backed Viacom18 got digital rights for Rs 23,758 crore.

In comparison, Sony had acquired rights by paying Rs 8,200 crore for the first 10 editions of IPL till 2017, and Star had won the rights for the next five years with a bid of Rs 16,347.50 crore.

While the cost of rights surged, Disney Star’s master playbook this year also had to take care of pricing amid inflationary times. Disney Star retained the Rs 19 per month fee for Star Sports 1 HD or SD services. Ambani’s JioCinema offered streaming for free on digital platforms, which however burns mobile Internet data.

Offering content on HD mode also costs more for the broadcaster, but Disney Star matched the prices with SD to ensure a larger customer base. Disney Star has 77 channels and out of these, close to 40% of channels are in HD.

“We are aware that essentials are becoming expensive for the consumers at large and in this kind of a scenario, we need to be careful with our pricing strategy. Just to quote you an example, in the HSM market, we have taken price increases on packages not more than 10% and that 10% is after a period of four years,” Kapoor said.

The official said people prefer to watch sports in HD. The company logged a reach of 66 million on HD channel for the first 29 games of IPL, according to BARC data, which is three times the reach from the previous edition.

India has been seeing a spike in demand for regional content as South Indian movies keep beating the otherwise dominant Bollywood movies. Now, local language commentary for cricket is certainly what viewers are going for as well.

Star Sports launched new HD South Indian language channels for broadcasting IPL and also played up the region-specific themes. It roped in a vast range of in-house experts like Gundappa Vishwanath, MSK Prasad, K Srikkanth, L Balaji, S Badrinath, Murali Vijay and S Sreesanth among others bringing fans closer to the game.

“This has been a big game changer since fans love watching sports in the language they understand and relate to…This has been a big growth vector for us and we have seen good consumer traction in markets like West Bengal, AP/ Telangana, Maharashtra and Gujarat,” Kapoor said.