No plan to charge subscription fee for sports: Viacom18 Sports CEO

This year’s Indian Premier League (IPL) too, like past editions, continued to break viewership numbers and the big difference was digital streaming being given free of cost. For the viewers, all they had to do was to download the JioCinema app on any device and the marquee cricket tournament would be live.  

Last year saw an intense battle being fought out to clinch the television and digital rights. For the period 2018-22, both were held by Disney Star. However, the rights for the next five-year period (2023-27) were split with Viacom18, a Reliance Industries- owned entity, winning the digital piece, while Disney Star had to settle for the television rights. Now, Viacom18 disrupted the status quo by going free on digital, through JioCinema, its OTT platform.  

In an interaction with Business Today, Anil Jayaraj, CEO, Viacom18 Sports made it clear that “there is no plan to charge a subscription fee for sports” on JioCinema.

That clearly takes away the revenue from subscription and puts substantial pressure on advertising. “We have done well on digital advertising during this season of the IPL and believe there is still a very large opportunity. To us, the democratisation of advertisers is a big emerging trend,” he said. The numbers projected for digital are obviously a huge source of encouragement. According to FICCI-EY’s report on the media and entertainment sector put out this April, revenue from digital media for this year is estimated to be Rs 67,100 crore, compared to Rs 57,100 crore last year. The projection for 2025 is Rs 86,200 crore or a compounded annual growth (between 2022-25) of 14.7 per cent.      

The decision to go free with JioCinema came out of a strategy built over time. ““We provided unrestricted access to anyone who wanted to watch it in a frictionless manner without a paywall or subscription,’ says Jayaraj. Besides, the audience could watch the IPL in cohorts, which led to 17 simultaneous feeds across 12 languages including English, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Bhojpuri and Odia. “Long-form content on digital is a reality today, and with 700 million internet users in India, a lot can be done.”

The reaction from Disney+Hotstar, the OTT platform owned by Disney Star was swift. On Friday, it released a statement that the upcoming Asia Cup and the ICC men’s cricket world cup “will be made available as free-to-view to all mobile phone users accessing their application”. It was a paid service earlier and with a large part of the subscriber base coming from the mobile phone users, the onus on advertising revenue is inevitable. Clearly, the last word on this battle is not out yet.