IPL begins innings abroad with a bang

The cricket tournament is way behind other global sporting events in viewership, but it’s making fast progress

India’s hottest sporting property, Indian Premier League (IPL), is scoring heavily abroad as well. The quick-paced cricket tournament, in its third season this year, has already surpassed every sporting event in India in terms of viewership. In the first 33 matches, IPL had a cumulative reach of 130 million viewers, according to TV audience monitoring agency TAM.

Though the numbers are not comparable with other global sporting events such as the National Basketball Association (NBA) games and the English Premier League, or EPL, (last year the NBA finals alone had a viewership of 115 million), IPL is making fast progress.

For instance, the match between Chennai Super Kings and King’s XI Punjab on March 21 garnered 0.56 million viewers on ITV4, the TV network that secured broadcasting rights to showcase IPL matches in UK. Compare this with last year’s 33,000 viewers on Setanta Sports, a UK TV network that is now defunct.

Media experts, however, feel that it’s still a bit too early to compare IPL with global sporting events. “We can’t compare IPL’s viewership with that of football as they are two different games and have distinct viewership profiles, however, the tournament has managed to attain tremendous reach this season with its association with YouTube,” said Rajesh Jain, head of media and entertainment, KPMG India.

The EPL, which is currently on air, reached 0.42 million homes and was seen by 0.52 million viewers in the US last weekend when Chelsea defeated Manchester United. It was the most-viewed English Premier League match on ESPN’s US networks, needless to say that football is immensely popular in the US while cricket is not.

According to Viewertrack, which surveys markets worldwide analysing international TV viewing, in 2009 EPL or UEFA tournament finals fetched a total audience of 200 million TV viewers, as compared to IPL’s 2009 finals, which fetched an audience of approximately 30 million TV viewers.

However, the edge that IPL enjoys this season is its foray into new media which has made the event available while on the move. As per the current statistics, IPL channel on YouTube has attracted around 31 million views and it is adding one million new views every day. For the first match that started on March 12, more than five million tuned in to YouTube. IPLT20.com the official website, too, saw 15 million hits.

July Systems, which has rights for IPL clips on mobile, claims that over the first 12 days of IPL over 0.7 million IPL videos have been watched by users on mobile phones.

According to Nielsen, the overall buzz about IPL in social media is almost twice as high in 2010 as compared to last year. Blogs are the most popular platform for discussing cricket, followed by message boards.

IPL Chairman and Commissioner Lalit Modi’s dream to have a cricket tournament that would rival the quality and support the football clubs in Europe command has come to an early fruition with the last two seasons.