Fans of the popular Indian Premier League (IPL) will now have to pay for viewership on the new JioHotstar platform, but Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel users will continue to have free access to platform content under their bundles, sources said.
Viewers have been watching IPL matches for free on JioCinema for the last couple of years, after the platform bagged the digital streaming rights in 2023. With the merger of JioCinema and Disney-Hotstar that spawned the mega platform JioHotstar, however, IPL will now be available at a minimum subscription ₹149. Sources said that any formal announcement on this is likely to be made closer to the start of IPL matches, scheduled to begin late in March. Reliance Industries Limited did not respond to a request for comment on its plans for IPL.
No impact on ad rates
According to Ajimon Francis, Managing Director of Brand Finance, the move will cause a flutter in the advertiser community but ultimately only cause a segmented impact rather than a pan-India impact.
“There will be questions and answers from both advertisers and broadcasters in terms of which segment is going to get hit more and how that will impact the ad rates. That discussion is going to happen over the next 2-3 weeks. So there is time till the third week of March for this to be sorted out. Still, I think it will be a segmented impact rather than an overall pan-India impact,” said Francis.
Similarly, Vikram Sakhuja, Group CEO of Madison Media & OOH, said, “What JioStar is doing is allowing 4 hours/month of free viewing (of any content) and introducing a charge of ₹149 only after a viewer has crossed that limit. Also we can expect some accretion in the base when jio cinema and hotstar fully migrate to jio hotstar – both on subscription and free. As a result, I don’t expect reach of IPL to fall.”
Expectations of predatory pricing
Meanwhile, Lloyd Mathias, Marketer & Business Strategist, anticipated some amount of predatory pricing given that key properties like IPL are now owned by the same group, right between JioStar and the television arm.
“Historically, they were using a lot of the key event properties in a way that they could get more subscribers on the channel because they were competing with HotStar at that time. So they were offering prime properties like FIFA World Cup, IPL, free of cost. Now, they will control the entire ecosystem both on television and digital. I think they will indulge in a bit of predatory pricing, which means they will even make subscribers pay and get subscribers to pay for content,” said Mathias.