Disney Star to air 12 IPL games on its FTA channel

IPL (12 matches including play-offs) will be made available for FTA channels. According to media reports, Disney Star will telecasting 12 IPL games on its FTA channel Star Utsav Movies.

By telecasting select IPL games to the FTA route, Star aims to reach out to the rural audience who don’t have access to pay-TV.

Karan Taurani, senior analyst at Elara Capital, believes this is primarily on the back of viewership growth pressure that Star may have anticipated due to IPL being available free on Jio Cinema and 2) a general decline in the pay TV households base.

However, he adds, this is a good strategy by Star as it may keep the pay TV household number in tact and more than compensate for the losses made by reduction in pay TV households (annual loss of ~3%, which is 5mn households), as against an addition of 35-40mn FTA households.
“This in turn will provide a competitive edge for Star vs Jio cinema and make total viewership reach possible towards 500mn on par with what Jio cinema has been providing for marketers. We continue to believe that time spent and consumption of matches will remain high on TV, as digital will primarily be convenience-led and on-the-go viewing; IPL on digital may get larger number of viewers or reach; however, time spent comparison to TV remains to be much lower,” said Taurani.

According to him, sports as a content offering remains to be preferred on the large screen and don’t see big threat for linear TV consumption unless
1)Smart TV numbers scale up (currently at 15%) and
2)Broadband penetration grows substantially (currently at 17%), as increased adoption of smart tv with affordable data has structural advantages like 1) 4K - better viewing experience and 2) interactivity, which linear TV does not offer.
Sports as a genre is more viewed in larger groups as compared to digital which is personalised in nature, which in turn will also propel time spent on Tv led by mass viewership.
“On the flip-side, we had already estimated that Jio cinema offering IPL free will be a big negative for ARPU’s for other OTT platforms; this has also pushed the linear TV broadcaster to push IPL free on FTA, in order to combat the higher viewership/reach number. We hope that this free offering on FTA stays only for a few matches going ahead too and does not extend to more matches, as it will be a big negative impact for monetisation of the most expensive entertainment IP in India. We hope the Jio Cinema offering too comes behind the pay wall next season onwards, as pure ad monetisation opportunities don’t support the high content cost, which makes business economics unviable,” he added.