Charge of the Mobile Brigade

From being a TV spectacle for over a decade, the IPL is now a prized catch for all digital stakeholders-from streaming platforms to advertisers and viewers

- SOHINI MITTER

ALMOST NOTHING CAPTURES India’s changing entertainment viewership patterns in the way the Indian Premier League (IPL) does. Since its inception in 2008, the wildly successful cricket league—the world’s second-most expensive sports league after America’s NFL—has been a centrepiece event for broadcasters. First on Sony Entertainment Television and later, on Star Sports, IPL has driven a lion’s share of the annual revenues of sports channels. But ‘the times they are a-changin’.

With the proliferation of the internet, IPL’s TV viewership has been on a steady decline, especially post the Covid-19 pandemic. After peaking in 2019 with 460 million TV viewers, IPL saw its viewership slide from 400 million in 2020 to 267 million in 2021 to 220 million last year. In 2023, it could drop even further.