New Delhi: Cricket remains the major contributor to sports viewership on Indian television, but football got a boost with the just-concluded 2018 Fifa World Cup in Russia where India were not even participating.
Sports viewership year-on-year has gone up. While it contributed 2.8 per cent to total TV viewership in 2016, it grew to 3.2 per cent in 2017 and 3.48 per cent in 2018, according to data from the Broadcast Audience Research Council (Barc).
With 64 per cent contribution to the sports genre coming from cricket, it remains the dominant sport being consumed on TV. However, premium sports events such as the World Cup, English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga and more have also proved to be a hit with Indian viewers, Barc pointed out.
For the first 58 matches, the World Cup garnered a viewership of 194.1 million ‘impressions’, while the combined viewership for the first two India versus England T20 matches was 20.7 million, the not-for-profit body that publishes weekly TV viewership data for India, said.
Impressions are the number of individuals of a target audience who viewed an event, averaged across minutes.
In June, which featured both cricket (India v Ireland and India v England) and football (Intercontinental Cup and Fifa World Cup), the contribution of football to sports on TV was 30 per cent, while that of cricket was 15 per cent.
The scale of viewership for football has seen an upswing that was spurred by the Fifa Under 17 World Cup in India in 2017, says Rajesh Kaul, Chief Revenue Officer of Sony Pictures Networks (SPN), one of the predominant players in the sports broadcasting business in India.
“The World Cup India 2017, which was the first Fifa event to be held in India, had a very positive impact on increasing viewership for football in India. The tournament turned out to be a milestone event as it became the most attended and highest-scoring tournament in its history.
“Over 35 per cent of total viewership for the event came from non-traditional football markets. The overall reach was over 47 million viewers across India. With the World Cup 2018 in Russia, the scale became even greater,” Kaul said.
The World Cup was shown on Sony Ten and Sony ESPN channels.
Kaul said that while India did not even participate, viewers across the nation had their favourite teams during the tournament, in which France emerged the winners beating Croatia in a thrilling final earlier this month.
With the favourable timing of matches for Indian viewers and with SPN’s coverage expanding to regional language feeds — in Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu — viewership of the football gala was “impressive”, Kaul said, adding that there was a rise female viewers, too.
To give the football fever a further boost, SPN had launched a “#MeriDoosriCountry”, literally ‘my other country’ campaign.
“The World Cup is the largest sporting event across the globe and it appeals to a diverse set of viewers. There are football fans and then there are World Cup fans who emerge to support their ‘doosri country’ every four years. Our campaign focused on bringing fans together to cheer for their adopted country even though they don’t have any national connect,” Kaul said.
