Hotstar, an Indian streaming service, held a cricket-themed event at the Metreon in San Francisco on Saturday as part of its efforts to boost the popularity of both cricket and its platform in the U.S. The event, called CricFest, featured two legendary Indian players, Anil Kumble and Virender Sehwag, plus Gaurav Kapur, host of the popular talk show Breakfast with Champions.
“Hotstar is a streaming service that provides live sports, Bollywood, and drama out of India for the South Asian diaspora at large,” said Ipsita Dasgupta, President of Hotstar International and Strategy at Star India “We have a ton of content in cricket. Over the next 12 months we have 160 days of cricket. We have all the big tournaments and just a lot of exciting stuff coming up, including surround content.”
Saturday’s CricFest included virtual reality cricket games and other activations designed to help boost familiarity with the sport. The target audience was the South Asian population of the Bay Area, including those who may have grown up in the U.S., and who might perhaps be bigger baseball fans than cricket fans, or who might not watch sports much in general.
“The idea is to take the consumer that is a huge cricket enthusiast all the way to people like me two years ago, who didn’t know anything about cricket, and bring them through this journey of just getting to experience and celebrate cricket,” Dasgupta said.
Dasgupta also sees South Asians as only the initial target audience. South Asians make up around one percent of the U.S. population. The ultimate ambition for Hotstar with its cricket content is to grow outside of that sphere of influence.
“Cricket is the second most watched sport in the rest of the world. It’s not just a sport that is kind of growing in small pockets of the world. It is after soccer the second most watched sport in the world,” Dasgupta said. “Clearly the U.S. is missing out.”
Although cricket is no longer a major sport in the U.S., the first ever international cricket match was played on America soil. That game, between the U.S. and Canada took place at St. George’s Cricket Club in New York in 1844.
“America was probably one of the first entrants into the game. Cricket was played on American soil in the late 1880s, so it would be nice to get America coming back into cricket. I know there’s a lot of popularity here. Whenever India plays, World Cups, anywhere in the world, I know a lot of American Indians fly out and watch those games,” Kumble said. “There’s a lot of interest here. I think cricket should be played here.”
Hotstar’s biggest attraction might be the Indian Premier League. Founded in 2008, the IPL features eight teams from around India playing a form of cricket called Twenty20. In T20 games, teams each play one innings of 20 overs. (An over is a set of six pitches, so each team faces 120 balls per innings.) Games are fast and high-scoring.
T20 games are also colorful, and no more so than in India. (The IPL is unquestionably the biggest T20 tournament.) In test match cricket, players exclusively wear white. In T20, they wear colored uniforms. In the IPL, there is music, and dancing, and noisy crowds.
Alongside Hotstar’s streaming content, the company plans to integrate batting data from a smart sticker developed by Kumble’s company Spektacom in partnership with Microsoft, and plans to release a mobile game alongside U.S. streams of the IPL this spring. That game debuted in India last season, and allowed fans to try to predict what would happen within the next over during each match. Sponsors put up prizes ranging from pizzas to cars.
“Everyone’s looking for fast entertainment in a world of ADD,” Dasgupta said. “Formats like the IPL have done a great job at bringing that in.”
When Dasgupta hosts visitors from the U.S. back home in India, she encourages them to check out an IPL game. “I had someone explain this to me,” Dasgupta said. “‘You know I came to a match that you guys invited me to, and I’m looking around, and the energy in the stadium is the way an American stadium feels when people have had a lot to drink.’ There’s no alcohol in the IPL matches.”