JioCinema witnesses record breaking IPL debut; sees 60 mn unique viewers

Marking its Indian Premier League debut with 4k viewing in 12 languages, that too for free, JioCinema grabbed the limelight by breaking records with its viewership and download numbers on the first day of IPL 2023.

With 25 million downloads on the opening day of IPL 2023, JioCinema set the record for being the most installed app in a single day, reported Moneycontrol’s Storyboard18.

Millions of viewers tuned in to watch their favourite teams compete during the first match of TATA IPL 2023, Gujarat Titans vs Chennai Super Kings. The opening day of the tournament became the most-watched event of JioCinema, with over 60 million unique viewers and a peak concurrency of over 16 million.

The total match views on Day 1 on JioCinema touched a whopping 500 million, hinting at its growing popularity in the sports streaming segment.

All the matches will stream for free on JioCinema. Earlier this year, the company announced that it would not charge the viewers anything to watch the tournament. The viewers of IPL 2023 will also be provided with a multicam feature, allowing them to switch between multiple camera angles. Moreover, the users will be able to watch the highlights on demand.

The JioCinema app will also let viewers check statistics such as score and pitch heat map on phones, while those watching on laptops or bigger screens will be able to see the information alongside the match.

Additionally, the “Hype” feature will allow users of the JioCinema app to get access to player statistics on demand.
Ahead of IPL 2023, Reliance Jio also came out with a special prepaid recharge offering of 3GB data per day and special data add-on plans offering up to 150 GB of free data.

However, the success of JioCinema as a sports streaming platform is not limited to the IPL season alone; millions of users had tuned in to watch the FIFA World Cup matches on the platform.

According to Moneycontrol’s report, 40 billion minutes of watch time was clocked across Sports18 and JioCinema. With this, JioCinema continued to be the number one downloaded free app on iOS and Android throughout the FIFA tournament.

Over 110 million Indian viewers viewed FIFA on different digital platforms, making the country one of the highest digital viewership markets for the football World Cup. On the final day of the FIFA World Cup alone, 32 million viewers tuned in to JioCinema.

“It is hard to predict the outcome of the effects based analysis vis-a-vis the other ongoing investigations, however, from a competition stand point, the effects based analysis should not cause any detriment to any party. The CCI has adopted this approach in the past as well though it varies from case-to-case,” said Kanika Chaudhary Nayar, partner, DSK Legal.