MUMBAI: Indian telecom giant Reliance Jio Infocomm Friday announced a five-year partnership deal with India’s leading broadcaster Star India to make all televised India-cricket matches available to users of its video streaming platform JioTV.
The partnership will cover T20, One Day Internationals (ODI), international Test cricket, and premier domestic competitions of the of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).
Additionally, for the first time ever, cricket production, a streaming platform, and a high-speed data network have come together to deliver the best of cricketing content with connectivity to benefit the Indian consumers, a joint release states.
Following the landmark streaming sports content partnership, Jio susbcribers, who earlier had to pay to watch live cricket tourneys such as the Indian Premier League (IPL) on Star India’s OTT platform Hotstar, will be able to watch these for free. So far in order to watch a cricket match or any other form of content a Jio user had to click on the Hotstar link inside the JioTV app that would then take them to Hotstar. With this cricket matches will be available as a separate feed inside the JioTV app.
“Every Indian must have access to the best sporting events as well as quality and affordable bandwidth to consume the content. With this partnership, we intend to address both these objectives of providing the best sporting content with the best digital infrastructure to Reliance Jio users. Jio promises to and will continue to bring a superlative customer experience in the areas of sports, augmented reality, virtual reality, immersive viewing and more in the coming days,” said Reliance Jio director Akash Ambani.
Commenting on the partnership, Star India MD Sanjay Gupta noted: “Over the last five years, we have re-invented the sports experience in India across screens, both television and digital. Indian cricket under BCCI is one of the most compelling properties in the world and we are excited to apply the same lens of innovation and re-invention to the property that we have applied to other sports in the last few years. And, with a new partner in Reliance Jio, we will have even more opportunities to raise the bar for cricket fans.”
Reliance Jio is betting big on the content space by making strategic acquisitions and partnerships. In March, the company announced integration of digital music app Saavn for its digital music service JioMusic . In February, Reliance Industries Ltd announced that it would buy a 5% stake in filmmaker Eros International Plc.
In April, Star India retained the television broadcast and digital rights for all domestic cricket under BCCI for the next five years for Rs 61.381 billion. This win effectively established Star India’s monopoly over all cricket media rights, including the Indian Premier League (IPL), which it won for Rs 163.475 billion (around $2.55 billion) in September 2017.
Hotstar at present offers an annual all-sports package for Rs 299. The package allows a premium subscriber to watch live cricket, besides the other sports properties Star India has rights to.
