MUMBAI: SonyLIV, the OTT platform owned by Sony Pictures Networks India (SPN), has announced that the recently concluded India’s tour of Australia garnered the highest viewership figures online for any overseas cricket series featuring the Indian men’s national team.
Viewers have spent 7 billion minutes on SonyLIV for live action during the Australian tour, which featured 3 T20Is, 4 Test matches and 3 ODIs, Economic Times, collating data provided by BARC, reports.
India won the latter two by a 2-1 margin while levelling the T20I series at 1-1, making it their most successful tour to the country in its cricketing history.
“India-Australia series was the largest cricket series outside India and viewers from across the country have seen the matches on SonyLIV. “With 50 million plus viewers on digital, this series has clocked three to four times higher number than South Africa and England tours.” SPN head of digital business Uday Sodhi told the business daily.
As many as 6.9 million viewers tuned in for the final match of the tour, which was the third ODI and the series decider at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). It garnered far more interest than the Indian team’s tour of South Africa and England last year, which registered numbers of 2 and 2.5 million in terms of peak concurrency.
However, the Australian ODI is still behind the IPL 2018 final when it comes to being the most watched match online, as it had recorded a 10.3 million reach on rival OTT platform, Hotstar.
Sodhi opines that India’s better performance Down Under as compared to the other two countries as well as the morning timing of the matches, are two reasons for impressive numbers clocked by SonyLIV. He claims that 22.5 million viewers were aged 18-24 while the five cities with the maximum reach were Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Patna respectively.
“Digital is becoming first choice for the young audience as nearly half of the viewers were below 24 years. But more gratifying fact is that because of better connectivity, millennials across tier II and III are also able to watch the matches,” Sodhi concluded.
The success of the broadcast was summed up with the VOD platform bagging 40 on-air sponsors such as Cure.fit, Swiggy, Zomato, Xiaomi, Pepsi and Google for instance.
