Indian social media and social entertainment platform Hotstar set a new record for the most concurrent users on a live stream on Sunday. The Indian Premier League final between the Chennai Super Kings and Sunrisers Hyderabad was watched by 10.7 million users at the same time. The Super Kings won the title by eight wickets.
Hotstar is run by Star India, which is itself backed by Twenty-First Century Fox. The service has streamed the IPL for the last five years, and in September 2017, paid $2.39 billion to secure streaming rights for the next five seasons. Hotstar’s coverage of the IPL was streamed in six different languages: Telugu, Hindi, English, Kannada, Bengali, and Tamil.
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Cricket is the biggest sport in India, a country of 1.3 billion people, and the IPL has become the biggest T20 cricket tournament in the world. The previous streaming record was also held by Hotstar: 8.26 million during a qualifier for the final between the same two teams on May 23. Over the course of the 2018 tournament, Hotstar also offered a virtual reality experience and on-demand content.
SportTechie Takeaway
Hotstar’s recording-setting IPL streaming season highlights the fact that while cricket might be a minor sport in the United States, it is one of the biggest and most important on a global scale. Last year, Facebook bid $608 million for the right to stream the IPL from 2018 through 2022, but that was only a quarter of the money Star India was willing to put up.