Star India is targeting new audience for the Indian Premier League 2019 through GEC screens. The Indian Premier League broadcast and entertainment quotient this year will go beyond the basic sportainment. The IPL host broadcater is planning some hard core entertainment quotient around the league on the weekends.
Some of the Star India GEC screens over the weekends will be abuzz with a lot of entertainment stuff around the IPL this season. Star, in its first year of IPL last season, had taken the broadcast of cricket world’s richest league to new heights. While a great debut had been the ambition last year, this time there is an additional challenge to deal with the
revised tariff regime, which holds a threat to the reach and access to sports channels.
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To go for the family and kids, Star will have Super Sundays, where the Sunday matches, opening and closing matches will be aired across Hindi and regional language movie or mass entertainment channels apart from regional sports channels. Thakar said families and kids are really a second layer of audience, which will be targeted on Sundays, while the mass viewers and the real aficionados will continue to watch on Star Sports and Star Sports Select. Star is also planning to get kids on the commentator panel on Sundays.
The new initiatives will include:
> Weekend broadcast on GEC channels
> Regional feed on GEC channels over weekends
> Additional Entertainment quotient over weekends
> Kids to come on board for weekend GEC broadcast
Star India has a concrete strategy in place to deal with the situation. The IPL this year will have additional entertainment quotient for family and kids. This will also offer more opportunities to advertisers. The idea is to make it the biggest of all the 12 seasons of the IPL.
“From our perspective, this is the second year and we have learned a lot in year one. We know that IPL is by far India’s biggest property across genres and Sony did a nice job in getting it to that level. Now, we are excited to take it to the next level,” Star India CEO Gautam Thakar has told ET.
“We have learned that cricket is such a massive sport that you really can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach. And this is India’s biggest event, so we will customise the feeds for different groups of audience,” Thakar said.
Insidesport.co was first to report yesterday that Star Sports will broadcast the IPL 2019 in eight different languages across nearly 20 screens. The feed will also be streamed live on Star’s VoD platform Hotstar.
Also read: Star India plans eight language broadcast
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