India’s growing influence in sport is nothing but a reflection of India’s growing significance on the global stage, driven by a strong consumption-oriented economy, said Sanjog Gupta, CEO – Sports and Live Experiences, JioStar, during the APOS Fireside Chat in Bali on Wednesday.
“This IPL, not only have we reached a billion viewers across platforms, we have also managed to make this IPL the most monetised edition of the event and also the most monetised sporting event ever in India across advertising and subscription revenue,” he said.
“Over the last decade and a half, Star and now JioStar has actually been the biggest private investor in Indian sport and in Indian media and entertainment. Largely with the mission to build what we believe can be a media and entertainment economy, but more than that, a media consumption economy, which is much larger in scale to anything that could have been imagined,” he added.
Gupta highlighted that while numbers around acquisition prices for sports rights tend to be thrown around a lot, what at times gets missed is the sheer investment that a network such as theirs has made to grow those properties by way of marketing, by way of production, by way of investment in technology and that over the last decade and a half exceeds 500 million dollars.
“That is outside of what we paid for the acquisition of rights. We believe sports serves as a recruitment funnel to bring in viewers and fans at scale, who then can be taken on a journey on a platform which could entail a live event, a Hindi entertainment show, or it could entail one of our new originals which is marketed on the back of a big sporting event and a recent example of that is the returning season of Criminal Justice which benefited significantly by launching in the last week of IPL,” Gupta said.
Furthermore, he went on to say, “Our mission wasn’t to incrementally change the landscape, it was to completely shift the way consumers perceive paying for content and also over a period of time, attribute value to the entertainment needs they have. The subscribers are on the platform and not just on IPL and it started with an interesting hybrid subscription strategy, which allowed everyone to come onto the platform free. So it’s not pay at the gate, we’re not trying to keep people out and having them pay before they can consume. The model is based on a real life example of how you shop, which is you go into a mall or a store, you sample enough and more of what you may want to look at and then choose to pay for deeper engagement, which in that case is purchase of an item.”
Gupta pointed out that they do not want to be a single content or be known for a single content genre and that applies to sport as well.
“We have looked to grow the English Premier League significantly over the last five years. In fact, over the last five years the viewership for the English Premier League across our platforms has grown almost three and a half X (3.5x). Largely on the back of localisation efforts where we’ve taken Premier League deeper into the Indian sports ecosystem than ever before by producing it in languages meant for regions which have affinity for football. At the other end of the spectrum, you have a sport like kabaddi which is a sport that goes back thousands of years and is a part of India’s history but also it’s a part of India’s recreation where kids grow up playing it as a game. We’ve professionalized it and continue to invest in it to build it as India’s second most favorite sport. It already is the second biggest league in the country but our objective with it is for the sport itself to grow and become a year-long proposition instead of being a two to three-month league,” Gupta said.
“Our premise around sport is don’t look to serve many fans as one but look to serve almost each fan as many and what that means is every fan at different points of time and on different devices and in different modes of consumption will consume your content differently. So can you create infinite hyper-personalized journeys for each and every fan instead of serving one streaming experience to all and that’s the core tenet of the platform,” he added.
