The ongoing Indian Premier League has set new viewership records in a year where for the first time the media rights were split between two companies. Sanjog Gupta, Head of sports – Disney Star, said while there is room for both television and digital platforms to grow, TVs still command the leadership role based on high penetration, engagement and its immersive nature. In an exclusive interaction with ET Online’s Gourab Das, the top official also shed light on viewership numbers, growth markets, consumer behaviour, key company strategies and if the media behemoth will again bid for both digital and TV rights in future.

This is the first year that the media rights for IPL have been split into two different broadcasters. Do you see it as a point of concern?

Sanjog Gupta: Firstly, it is what it is. Anything new and anything which is different from the past always causes a certain level of discomfort, but it could potentially also unlock beyond the value that has been unlocked in media rights for BCCI, consumers and for potential advertisers. It could mean more value for the community at large.

However, I think, where things stand today, we would like to believe and I genuinely believe, it is not a zero-sum game. Sport in this country has enough headroom for growth for multiple stakeholders and multiple rights holders to be able to grow. At the end of the day a rising tide lifts all boats.

Given a chance, will Star bid for both TV and digital rights again?

Sanjog Gupta: Yes. But the same question you should ask me may be three-to-four years down the line. It is too early for us to have any second thoughts about bidding for those rights, nothing has changed since we participated in the e-auction a few months back. There is no reason for us to revisit a decision that we took few months back. If anything, we are even more confident of our strategy and now are very sure that IPL on Star is on a growth trajectory.

How are you pricing your ad slots competitively and what are the extra benefits that you are providing for the advertisers?

Sanjog Gupta: I am not at liberty to disclose pricing, but the most interesting thing that we have done is to create packages relevant for advertisers with outlays ranging from a crore to hundreds of crores of rupees. This is unlike past times where perhaps the threshold for minimum outlays was too high for advertisers.The second thing is around solutions, which is that a lot of brands do not just want exposure but they want to be deeply associated with Star Sports. For example, for Airtel 5G we have come up with a tech innovation which allows fans, digital avatars to be in the studio and engage with commentators.

IPL viewership this year is setting records. How do you see the viewership of IPL on television in the first week of the tournament? How does it fare compared with the last few seasons?

Sanjog Gupta: We are overwhelmed with the response that IPL on Star has been getting and that is the only way of describing the outcome. While we were very focussed on raising the bar on our coverage and were genuinely committed to growing IPL viewership, a secondary consideration for us obviously this year, given the way that the rights were distributed, was to drive consideration specifically for IPL on Star. I think the fact that we have grown significantly compared to last year by almost 25% and have equalled records for IPL set in the past gives us a very strong belief that we have been successful in doing both, driving consideration for IPL and emphatically driving consideration for IPL on Star.

Our peak concurrency for the first 10 matches is 5.6 crores or 56 million, that is the highest peak concurrency that any match in the first 10 days or 10 matches of IPL or 8 days of IPL has achieved ever other than those two pandemic years, which were exceptional years. The fact that 31 crore viewers watched the first 10 matches, which equalled the record for most viewers watching the first 10 matches of IPL other than again those two COVID years, also means that the level of anticipation and preference as a destination that we were able to drive was significant enough for people to flock in really large numbers in the first 10 matches of IPL itself.

Is it going according to your plan and expectations?

Sanjog Gupta: Given that we were starting a new rights cycle, our ambition was to start on a strong growth trajectory, much the same way as our ambition was in 2018 when we acquired IPL for the first time. We were always believers in the fact that IPL has headroom for growth. It has immense headroom for growth on television, which is why we acquired the TV rights. We believe that in this country television will continue to be a mass aggregator of audiences and will continue to drive the intensity of viewership and consumption as demonstrated by the peak concurrency levels, which have been more than 3x that of the peak concurrency in the same period that digital managed to achieve.

Which are the biggest markets driving the growth of viewership on TV?

Sanjog Gupta: UP has grown significantly on the back of big initiatives including a tie-up with Lucknow Super Giants, signing up KL Rahul as a brand ambassador and a wider recruitment strategy propelled by deeper penetration of Star Sports 1 Hindi. The second market is Gujarat, where we launched the Gujarati feed for the first time last year and tied up with Hardik Pandya and Ravindra Jadeja as our brand ambassadors. The third market that has grown is Karnataka and that is largely on the back of Virat Kohli’s popularity who again happens to be one of our brand ambassadors. Star Sports 1 Kannada now has almost a 70% share of the total viewership in the state.

The fourth state driving the growth is Delhi and that is on the back of enhanced Hindi feed . The fifth market which has seen most significant growth and has contributed to the overall growth the most is AP, Telangana largely on the back of the launch of Star Sports 1 Telugu and our association with actor Nandamuri Balakrishna who galvanised tier II and tier III towns.

It is interesting that a large part of the growth in AP, Telangana is actually coming from outside Hyderabad and that is largely driven by the initiative to market and make Telugu available as widely as possible. The third factor in the AP, Telangana is the entire feed in Telugu has actually been formatted in a game show format.

How does the viewership fare in comparison with the digital? Is television a dying medium?

Sanjog Gupta: We have genuinely always believed that TV was not even in any state of illness let alone dying. There was a temporary blip in IPL, which was caused due to multiple extraneous factors and not necessarily caused by people’s habit or preference for television.

The peak concurrency for TV across the first 10 matches was 5.6 crores or 56 million. The same peak concurrency for the same 10 matches on digital was 1.8 crores or 18 million. We also clocked 6,230 crore minutes of consumption across these 10 matches. We have seen some numbers around views that have been published by the digital platform, which may be about 550 crores for the first 17 matches.

Do you think digital will have a large impact on tv viewership or are they threats to each other?

It does not have to be a zero-sum game. There is enough headroom for growth across TV and digital.

Yes, TV will continue to be the larger aggregator and will also continue to drive deeper engagement. TV continues to be the preferred destination for marquee sports events where large communities come together to experience the same emotion. Especially in tier II, tier III towns it would not have been possible for IPL to be achieving the kind of scale that it manages to achieve without TV’s penetration.

The number of or the frequency with which you engage with the smaller screen is higher but the average session time and the retention of viewers on that smaller screen tends to be much lower. TV continues to deliver higher peaks of concurrency, as well as more volume of content watched and there is deeper engagement in terms of the time spent per viewer, which happens to be 40% to 50% higher than the average time spent by a viewer watching on the digital platforms.

How do you see a change in behavior or habit of consumers probably in the long run?

Sanjog Gupta: Look, consumer habits are always evolving. So, it would be foolhardy on my part to say that consumer habits do not evolve and which is why it is important for television to evolve with those consumer habits evolving. That is why a big part of the thrust of our coverage has been around how we adapt to the evolution of the consumer. Some measures have to do with highlighting or almost amplifying the virtues of television or the big screen which drive the consideration for it and some have to do with the addition of new features, which make the big screen either more engaging or more interactive or more immersive. We have tried to do both.

What have been your strategies or technology advancements to grab a larger audience share?

Sanjog Gupta: Our fundamental thinking started with the acknowledgement that the consumer has evolved. We launched Star Sports VIP and Star Sports Pro on Tata Play and Airtel. Real-time highlights are being served which are being updated every over. The second feature was the replay of key moments whenever you choose to watch them. The third feature was for super fans who want real-time stats from the game available at the drop of a hat. The last and final feature was the feature around following your hero. So, you have the option of pressing a button and seeing at any given point of time what your favorite star in that game is doing. We also launched for the first-time live subtitling or captioning of the commentary.

Steve Smith, Jacques Kallis, David Hussey, Paul Collingwood, all of these guys are also joining us virtually as holograms in our studio and engaging with the commentators. The fourth is we partnered with Dolby and made a request to the BCCI to produce the IPL in Dolby Atmos for all our HD viewers to deliver a more stadium-like feel in the coverage..

Apart from these tech ones, what are you doing to augment the viewership reach and are there any plans you are holding up for midway into the season or something that you have not revealed yet?

Sanjog Gupta: We signed up a galaxy of superstars who we believed were going to bring the IPL alive. Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul, Hardik Pandya, Ravindra Jadeja – we created the biggest galaxy of superstars.

We planned a big splash where Salman Khan was a part of our Hindi coverage to tell the stories of IPL. Also, we will have Priyanka Chopra soon. The idea behind doing this is to drive consideration for IPL amongst those who either have not sampled IPL till now or do not have deep interest in IPL but are fans of Bollywood. It is the same effort that we made with Ranveer Singh or with Telugu superstar Nandamuri Balakrishna.

A big part of the strategy was also for the first time offering a sampling opportunity of the IPL to free to air viewers. So, we took select games and made them available on our free to air channel with the view that we will be able to convert some of them into subscribers of Star Sports.

Twitter has been talking about Bhojpuri commentary and you have actors who have no relation with the game being commentators during the match. Don’t you think there is a fall in the quality of commentary when you are using that ploy?

Sanjog Gupta: We are not looking to deliver a feed which is anything but a driver of fandom for IPL and its heroes and its narratives. Even when we get Bollywood stars to be a part of our coverage, it is always with the lens that they are super fans of the game.

We believe that at no point the game should be undermined, that is not something that we believe will drive fandom for the game and thus will yield returns in the long term. Yes, the commentary needs to evolve and commentary needs to evolve with the times. But, to turn coverage of the game into something that is looking to elicit laughter is definitely not the route that we believe over a period of time will yield the fandom, the attention and the viewership that will mean business success.

What advice will you give to brands and marketers looking to navigate the TV vs digital media landscape and how can they effectively use both to reach their target audience?

Sanjog Gupta: The advice that I would give brands and advertisers is to evaluate platforms based on the objectives that you have for your brand. There is also a strong overlap of consumption that happens for fans driven by the convenience of watching on a screen that is mobile and the comfort/quality of experience that television offers. If a brand wants to be omnipresent and wants to speak to the same consumer across multiple touch points, then there is no reason to not evaluate both digital and television for presence.