The final match of ICC Men’s World Cup was the most-watched event ever on both linear TV and digital streaming. The live broadcast on TV of the final match garnered reach of 30 crore viewers, said Disney Star, quoting BARC data. It also delivered a peak concurrency of 13 crore viewers on TV.

At the same time, Disney+ Hotstar, the broadcaster’s streaming arm, achieved a peak concurrency of 5.9 crore for the final match played between India and Australia.

“As per BARC, overall tournament crossed a viewership of half a billion viewers for the first time as 518 million (51.8 Crore) TV viewers tuned in for the live broadcast of the marquee tournament,” the statement added. It also garnered 422 billion minutes of TV watch time making it the most watched ICC Men’s World Cup in the history of the event, it added.

Sanjog Gupta, Head-Sports, Disney Star, told businessline, “World Cup has been a historic event in terms of scale of viewership. It reaffirms our belief that both TV and digital mediums have immense headroom for growth in terms of live sports and this growth does not have to come at the cost of each other. Our fundamental mission has been to serve sports fans irrespective of the platform or the screen that they want to engage with. So these numbers validate that sports viewership or sports fandom is agnostic of platforms. Live sports viewing is an aggregated experience, which for most viewers, tends to be multi platform and multi dimensional.”

Good revenues

He added that it has been a successful World Cup for the broadcaster in terms of monetisation both in terms of ad revenues as well as subscription revenues. “The World Cup timed with the festival season re-energised the advertising ecosystem,” Gupta stated.

The World Cup was made accessible to mobile viewers for free through Disney+ Hotstar. “This hybrid strategy was adopted to drive up access to the World Cup and also scale up the usage of Disney+ Hotstar as a platform. That strategy seems to have paid-off as we have broken our own concurrency record five times through the tournament,” Gupta said.

Stating that it has been a watershed year for cricket, Gupta said, “We have had the biggest ever IPL season followed by the biggest ever Asia Cup edition and now the biggest ever World Cup. Our ambition continues to be to grow the sport, serve fans by offering them an elevated viewing experience and deepen engagement,” he added.

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