Will IPL 6 be a battleground between online & TV viewership?

BANGALORE, INDIA: Here is something heartening for the official broadcaster of the upcoming Indian Premier League season six (IPL 6), the Twenty20 (T20) extravaganza that Indian audiences have more than warmed up to, is set to kick off by April 3.

A TV Rating Estimation Study by MEC, a media buying and planning agency and a founding partner of GroupM, and Meritus, has indicated that TV viewership would marginally increase from 3.8 TVR in 2012 (IPL 5) to 3.9 TVR this edition.

Going by the study report, it would be a rise of 2.6 per cent for audiences aged above 15 and apparently, Mumbai Indians (4.5), Kolkata Knight Riders (4.2) and Chennai Super Kings (4.1) games are touted to have the highest ratings.

"Our study suggests that IPL seems to have matured as a property. The study clearly establishes that ratings in the first phase (first 18 games) impact the fate of the entire league. With Pepsi activating their title sponsorship in a big way, the BCCI launching the IPL Fantasy League and India's strong performance against Australia, the first stage of the league could get further momentum," T. Gangadhar, managing director, MEC India, was quoted saying.

But if there is one trend that is posing a constant threat to the dominance by television, it is the online platform. Sample this: Although IPL 5 TV ratings improved to an average of 4.0 TVR after 27 games last season, it was still 5 per cent lower than in 2011. Among viewers aged above four years across India, the average hovered around 3.53 TVR (IPL 5) as against 3.88 during IPL 4. Just a minor indication that people might be increasingly switching to alternative channels, like online or mobiles.

Also, only nine days into the IPL 5, Apalya Technologies, which was the official mobile streaming partner of the season, garnered five times the views it managed to scrounge the whole of the previous edition. The views at the start of season five during the said period, according Vamshi Krishna Reddy, co-founder and CEO of Apalya, was about 1.4 million compared to the paltry 0.25 million last year.

"One of the reasons for mobile viewing of games is the timings of matches. On weekdays, from 4 pm to 11 pm in the evenings, people will be on roads. The average time spent per user also went up from 3-4 minutes to 12 minutes." It is pertinent here to note that their official subscriber base swelled up to more than 250,000 users over IPL 5.

It's not only the mobile users, even those who are on the move in their cars had opted for avaniTV's live streaming through a set-top box. When we enquired, Indranil Maitra, vice-president, Content, Creative and MarCom, of the live TV, movie-on-demand service provider for in-car entertainment, had informed us that the response they had been witnessing was very good so far.

With the IPL website of Times Internet Limited, the official digital broadcaster of IPL in partnership with YouTube last season, had recorded 13.7 million views as against 8.8 million views last year, that too, over one week alone, is something TV channels would be wary of.

Let's wait and watch whether IPL 6 would prove a battleground not just for the T20 clubs, but also between online and TV viewership. If you think this season might set some new trends in this regard, pen down your views here.