IPL reinvigorating interest in Pay TV: Sanjog Gupta, CEO – Sports, JioStar

Were you concerned of a cricket fatigue considering Champions Trophy just happened?

Only non-contextual cricket will cause fatigue. My proclivity to watch any cricket greatly depends on whether or not I care for it. IPL every year needs that contextual push. In India, the number of days of cricket in a year typically is between 150 to 200 days but the number of episodes of a popular GEC show is over 250. If Indian audiences are willing to consume GEC shows in that number, we can have a reasonable belief that 200-220 days of cricket will not cause fatigue.

You took a big risk trying to get the IPL rights in terms of combining the two platforms and taking in DisneyHotStar. Are you confident about IPL being worth all the effort?

Absolutely. On Linear TV this is turning out to be the biggest IPL ever, both in terms of reach and watch time numbers. It’s also reinvigorating the interest in pay television. The category of pay television has grown on the back of IPL. So, there is a network benefit that Jiostar gets by virtue of IPL, driving subscribers to pay television. Digital consumption has grown upwards of 30 per cent compared to last year. We’ve seen consumption and watch time numbers for our Hollywood content go up dramatically, largely because users, by virtue of being subscribers, are are watching content other than IPL, which are also on the platform. So, the network effect of the IPL fuelled growth is creating value in other parts of the business. We have data now for about one third of the IPL and we have already seen almost as many CTV homes watching IPL as they did last year for the full season.

What kind of feedback are you getting from advertisers?

Advertisers already a part of the IPL ecosystem want to double down on IPL and upgrade their spends for more visibility. We’re still signing new clients. Samsung actually came on board after the first week after they saw the IPL opening and record numbers. Also, now that we have large and seasonal advertisers locked in, we are focusing on SMBs to see how much demand can be generated by way of disaggregating some of the inventory. So, even on monetization front there is a direct benefit of IPL, either in the form of advertising revenues or subscription revenues or the network value.

You also put IPL viewing behind a paywall this time. Was that a tactic to battle revenue pressures?

It’s not an exclusionary strategy. Once you’ve watched a certain amount of IPL, you will hit a paywall and that is based on the belief that once you’ve watched enough, you are committed to that content stream. All our sports content other than marquee global events will fall in the same foundational will fall in the same foundational framework that we have which is watch, engage and then at some point you pay.

IPL ad rates are not meeting the expectations that people had anticipated. Why is this so?

What is success for us is that every advertiser who advertises on IPL feels satisfied with the investment and the return on investment. Till such time as that value price equation is tilted towards value, we are comfortable. Different advertisers come in with different objectives and their level of investment tends to vary. For example, an Amul may be more interested in the association with the pre and post shows because of the visibility and the associative value that that association gives their brand than actual inventory. It’s very important for us not to take a singular metric like price in isolation, instead of looking at the value that the advertiser is drawing from that association.  

But then will small and medium businesses be able to compete here? 

They’re not looking to compete, they’re looking for visibility. High levels of audience delivery on digital platforms enable brands and small advertisers to target cohorts, which are small enough for their ROI. You could have a jewellery brand that has its spread only in Tamil Nadu, only advertising on the Tamil feed. That price will be significantly lower than the price that is paid by a national advertiser who is trying to reach 400-600 million viewers.

Between live streaming of content and on-demand content is there like advertisers leading towards any particular form of content? 

Sports is 80 per cent live because the aggregated value of sport is in live. What we are seeing increasingly especially for advertisers who don’t have large outlays, there is a proclivity to tend towards highlights ward pre and post shows etc. It comes at lower ticket pricing and has very high levels of association. So, we are seeing an increasing share of wallet orienting towards ward and some of the shoulder content that gets created around life because live inventory, there’s a cap on it but if you want to expand both the volume of advertising and the value of association it’s very important to create these additional assets which then advertisers look at as ways of either driving association or as lower ticket price entry points.

Audiences on JioHotstar are active consumers and not passive viewers. They are more deeply engaged, be it on live cricket or its surround programming. Because they are watching with deep passion, it makes them more receptive to brand messaging. We have a unique and significant play in the passion economy unlike other platforms fighting for attention.