Viacom18-owned streaming platform Jio Cinema‘s penetration has grown by almost 4X to 40.26% on the back of free streaming of the Indian Premier League (IPL), says research by Bobble AI, a conversation media platform. Prior to the start of the IPL season, the platform’s penetration stood at 10.73%.

The research also highlighted that the platform has seen a surge in downloads, with the proportion of new installs to total installs being approximately 72% during IPL 2023 compared to 28% before the IPL season. The research noted that IPL has helped the platform bring in more than two-thirds of the total users of Jio Cinema.

The app open rate for Jio Cinema jumped from 53% pre-IPL to 89% during the tournament. The number of sessions during the IPL rose to 95 from 19 pre-IPL. The average session time during the entire IPL season zoomed to 657 minutes from 117 minutes before the tournament.

The firm noted that the platform’s penetration stood at 3% last year during the IPL. JioCinema became the official IPL streaming partner in 2023. Till 2022, the IPL was streamed on Disney+ Hotstar.

The Market Intelligence (MI) unit of Bobble AI conducted a study to understand the comparative dynamics around the digital viewership of the IPL on Jio Cinema and a comparison of the viewership with the IPL 2022, which streamed on Disney+Hotstar. The study tries to compare the engagement and penetration of the respective apps and the impact of the paid subscription versus the free subscription models.

The firm said that the research was done in a privacy-compliant manner using its first-party data on over 85 million people and devices. The periods chosen for the study were the pre-IPL 2022 period (26th February–20th March), the IPL 2022 period (26th March–29th May), the pre-IPL 2023 periods (1st March–25th March), and the IPL 2023 period (31st March–10th May).According to the research report, JioCinema got an initial push during the FIFA World Cup 2022, increasing the penetration of the app to 9%, while the IPL 2022 gave an impetus of just about 3.5% to the penetration of Disney+Hotstar (30.24% to 33.51%).As reported earlier, the IPL final between Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and Gujarat Titans (GT) on Monday night had 32 million peak concurrent users on Viacom18’s JioCinema app. This is the first time a cricket match has breached the 30-million peak concurrency mark in the country. The data has been provided by Viacom18, the official digital streaming partner of the IPL.

The concurrent viewership in the final match, which was won by CSK by five wickets under the Duckworth/Lewis method, has broken the earlier peak concurrency record of 25.7 million viewers for the second qualifier match between GT and Mumbai Indians on Friday.

Prior to that, the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup semi-final match between India and New Zealand had a record peak concurrency of 25.3 million viewers on Disney+Hotstar.

Viacom18 said the total video views for the IPL till the second qualifier had crossed the 16-billion mark. Earlier, the company stated that the average time spent per viewer per match was in excess of 60 minutes.

The official IPL streamer had roped in 26 sponsors and over 800 advertisers for this year’s tournament. It had set an overambitious target of mopping up Rs 3,700 crore in advertising revenue from the event.