Indian Premier League Cricket Upends Expectations as Games Land on Free Streaming Service After Disney+ Departure
Disney is still getting used to no longer being a major name in the Indian cricket broadcasting game. Disney+, or as it is branded in India Disney+ Hotstar, held the streaming rights to Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket until June of 2022, when they were acquired by Viacom18, a private media outlet that is 51% owned by an Indian media conglomerate and 49% owned by Paramount Global.
A new report from Ampere Analysis has details about the future of IPL streaming, since Disney+ will no longer carry matches. In the future, matches may end up on Paramount+ in India, but for the rest of 2023, Jio Cinema — a free ad-supported video streaming platform — will broadcast IPL games. This is a marked departure from when games were available on Disney+, as they were segmented behind a paywall, and not made available to stream for free.
Cricket is the most popular sport by far in India; one match on Wednesday, April 12 drew 22 million concurrent views, demonstrating the devotion that Indian fans have for the sport. Super Bowl LVII, for comparison, was watched by 36.7 million households, and if a mid-week, regular-season cricket match can draw almost two-thirds of that number, it shows just how deeply committed to the sport its viewers are.
The loss of IPL rights was a big reason that Disney+ suffered a decline in subscribers for the first time in the service’s history when the company reported its latest earnings in January. From October to December 2022, Disney+ lost 2.4 million global customers; the drop was fueled entirely by Indian users, as 3.8 million departed the service during that period. Considering the ratings that IPL matches drive, the loss of its streaming rights was clearly a blow to the service.
How big of a blow it will wind up being in the long term remains to be seen. Former Disney CEO Bob Chapek thought of India as a centerpiece for his strategy of growing Disney+ to between 230-240M global users by 2024. But Chapek is now gone, and so is the logic that a high volume of users is equivalent to streaming success. Streamers now have to turn a profit to be considered successful by Wall Street analysts and investors, and Disney+ currently finds itself mired in streaming losses that still top $1 billion every quarter.
Disney is retaining the linear broadcast rights to IPL cricket in India, so it will not completely lose out on all the viewers it had accrued over the years. Still, there’s no arguing that losing IPL cricket was a big blow to the company’s flagship streaming platform, and JioCinema now stands to benefit. The ad-supported streaming platform will host IPL matches for free for the remainder of 2023.
Disney+
Disney+ is a video streaming service with over 13,000 series and films from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, The Muppets, and more. It is available in 61 countries and 21 languages. It is notable for its popular original series like “The Mandalorian,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Loki,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” and “Andor.”