NEW DELHI: Fresh off bringing all big-ticket cricket played in India under his network’s wing, Uday Shankar, chairman and CEO of Star India and president of Twenty-First Century Fox Asia, has expressed confidence that ad revenues from this year’s IPL will cross Rs20 billion.
Last week, Star India retained BCCI media rights for all cricket played in India for Rs61.381 billion, outbidding Sony Pictures Networks and Jio (Reliance Industries Ltd), while last September, it won the television broadcasting and digital media rights to the Indian Premier League for a princely sum of Rs163.475 billion.
Both the rights are for a period of five years.
“Although I don’t usually talk numbers, we will exit IPL with an ad revenue of Rs2,000 crore (Rs20 billion) this year,” Shankar told Mint.
“The target is to reach 70 crore (700 million) Indians with IPL this year. Last year, 41 crore (410 million) people watched IPL on television,” Shankar told the business daily.
Star is expanding the reach of IPL through the language feeds which offer commentary in regional languages. Other than Hindi and English, commentary for the matches is now available in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Bengali.
“The southern market was completely under-served. We have invested massively in these languages,” said Shankar.
“The advertising industry is growing at a healthy 14% a year. Besides, we could grow at a higher rate since we get a leadership premium,” he added.
And Star India is leveraging both television (Star Sports channels) and digital (Hotstar) for its cricket properties.
Last year, the reach on the opening match of IPL on digital media (Hotstar) was 18 million. “This year’s opening match reach was 42 million. That’s the kind of growth we are seeing,” Shankar told Mint.
The verifiable numbers Shankar is throwing is around reach. How he plans to square the circle on revenues is not quite so clear. Take television ad revenues. The best case scenario that is being talked up is in the Rs 16-17 billion ball park as far as gross advertising income is concerned. As for Hotstar, SportzPower understands that in IPL 2017, Star’s OTT platform mopped up Rs 1.35 billion in revenues. So even if we are talking a 100% growth over 2017, it totals Rs 2.7 billion.
However you slice and dice it, about the only given is that Shankar’s ad sales team has some seriously stiff targets to meet.
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