The Indian Premier League (IPL) continues to be a juggernaut in Indian sports and entertainment, with TV viewership surging by an incredible 40% since 2018. Even with the growing popularity of digital streaming, television remains the go-to platform for IPL fans. The ongoing IPL 2025 has drawn fans in huge numbers, with more than 25 crore people turning up their TVs to watch the opening week.
IPL viewership on TV continues to grow
JioStar Sports CEO Sanjog Gupta emphasized that this growth reflects IPL’s massive potential and the deep-rooted preference for TV among Indian audiences. Even as mobile and smart TV streaming options expand, television remains the most popular choice, offering a seamless, high-quality, and communal viewing experience.
“Since 2018, which is when we acquired the rights to IPL for Star at that time, on television viewership, it has grown close to 40%. Now for an evolved, mature property that the IPL already was in 2018, to grow as significantly as that shows two things,” said JioStar Sports CEO Sanjog Gupta via Times Of India.
The league is now under the unified umbrella of JioStar—a result of the Rs 70,352 crore merger between Reliance’s Viacom18 and Disney’s Star India.
Crazy amount of money for IPL rights
The IPL media rights auction has always been a high-stakes battle. In 2018, Star Sports acquired the TV and digital rights for Rs 16,347.50 crore over five seasons. The competition intensified in 2022, with Disney Star securing TV rights for Rs 23,575 crore, while Viacom18 spent Rs 23,758 crore for digital rights—marking the first time digital rights were valued higher than TV. JioStar’s vision for IPL 2025 is to reach an unprecedented one billion viewers across TV, mobile, and connected devices.
“Our ambition for growth across our linear platform which is Star Sports is just as ambitious as our ambition for growth on digital. It’s just that the headroom for growth on digital platforms by virtue of the sheer number of screens available for us to make the IPL accessible are far higher in the case of the mobile screens as compared to the living room devices,” stated Gupta.
“If you think that India has about 250-270 million households devoted only about 150-260 million currently have a living room device which they can watch any content on. That’s the headroom for growth for all living room devices,” he said.
