Mumbai: What was claimed to be a ‘watershed moment’ in the consumption of live sports in India has turned out to be a damp squib, at best. Live sports streaming has returned to its humble state shortly after the start of IPL 2023. The overestimation of Connected TVs, smartphone penetration and decline in Pay TV has been issued a reality check, just one week into IPL 2023. App analytics company DATA.AI quashes the tall claims made on digital across key app metrics as TV continues to be the viewer’s choice for IPL in India.
The Downloads Claim: Shortly after IPL 2023 began, the streaming platform claimed that their app downloads on the opening day stood at 2.5 crore whereas opening weekend downloads were five crore. However, the actual number of downloads was ratified by DATA.AI to a miniscule seven lac for the opening day and 30 lac for the opening weekend, a staggering difference that further escalates the need to validate self-reported data.
The Reach (DAU) Claim: The app claimed that the opening day of IPL witnessed six crore daily active users, whereas the DAU for the game stands a massive 40 per cent lower at 3.4 crore. In fact, what’s interesting is that the DAU for a free IPL on digital this year was 22 per cent lower compared to last year when IPL on digital was behind the paywall.
Video Views – Currency at Convenience: Over the years whether it be IPL on TV or digital, the measure for viewership of the event has always been viewers and not video views. Video views are not a function of high viewership, but only a function of increased number of sessions among viewers which is a consequence of interruptions or distractions while watching a live game on digital. The opening day of IPL faced widespread social media backlash across the country as the streaming app witnessed buffering issues, app crashes and playback errors that led to users restarting or reinstalling the app, which led to an inflation in video views. Advertisers have evaluated platforms on the count of viewers logging into the event and not the multiplicity of sessions required for a viewer to watch a live game of sport, which has never been a function of watching live sports.
The FIFA WC Story repeats itself: As the FIFA World Cup ended in December, the streaming app made two big claims that were stalled shortly after. The first claim was about the viewership for the FIFA World Cup final touching 32 million on digital, whereas only 9.3 million watched the game on mobile as per DATA.AI. The second claim was about digital viewership overtaking TV for the first time during the final match, and that too was quashed as the TV viewership during the final was 4X of digital. This happened even though there were no promotions for the TV broadcast of the event.
While TV continues to dominate viewership during IPL with growth across key metrics of evaluation, digital continues to be the secondary platform marred with inconsistencies in corroboration of its performance.
