Mumbai Indians most popular team on Hotstar in IPL 2017

Mumbai Indians, the Mukesh Ambani-promoted franchise in the Vivo Indian Premier League (IPL), emerged as the most popular team on Star India’s over-the-top platform Hotstar for the 2017 edition, according to data provided by the digital broadcaster.

The winners of the 10th instalment of the annual 20-20 extravaganza saw viewer interest not only from its home city but also from eight other markets, many of which have their own franchises. The only city that showed more affinity to another team was Chennai, which closely followed Rising Pune SuperGiant (RPS) apparently because of the presence of MS Dhoni. He was the skipper of Chennai Super Kings before the franchise was suspended in 2015 for two years over a spot-fixing scandal.  

Mumbai Indians were the most followed team across all IPL franchise cities, and also in Jaipur (which the currently suspended Rajasthan Royals called home). The home teams from Pune, Bengaluru and Kolkata were the second most followed teams, while RPS took the second position in markets like Hyderabad, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh and Jaipur.

Taking Mumbai Indians as the standard for maximum watch time per match at 100 per cent, KKR saw 91 per cent of the time spent enjoyed by the Rohit Sharma-led franchise, followed by RPS at 84 per cent. Delhi Daredevils were at the end of the list with 74 per cent of MI’s watch time. The Daredevils were number five on the popularity list in their home, lowest for a team in its home city.

According to data, the Mumbai-Pune ties garnered maximum eyeballs throughout the tournament, with the final match taking pole position, followed by a league match played between the two and the play-off match between the two teams from Maharashtra at the third spot.

The share of mobile consumption continued to grow in 2017, it revealed. In 2016, 61 per cent of the total IPL consumption on Hotstar came from mobile. The share of consumption through mobile shot up to 86 per cent this year. The most popular time slot on the platform was weekday prime time, followed by the prime time matches on Sunday and Saturday.

The top ten cities by consumption saw a shuffle this year, as Delhi was replaced by Bengaluru (last year at number 3) as the leader. Last year’s second spot holder Mumbai was displaced by Pune (last year at number 7). Kolkata, at number seven last year, jumped four spots to be the third highest city by consumption of IPL on Hotstar. 

This year saw three new entrants in the top ten cities by viewership – Patna, Lucknow and Indore, which replaced Chennai, Chandigarh and Bhopal. Interestingly, Chandigarh, the home town to the Kings XI Punjab, did not figure in the top 10 cities for viewership of the IPL on Hotstar. While most metrics saw growth for consumption of the IPL on the digital platform, the share of female viewership came down drastically. Last year, 22 per cent of the viewership came from the fairer sex while this year, it has gone down to 14 per cent. 

On television, female viewers contributed 41 per cent to the total viewership, in keeping with the trend from last year.

Hotstar also emerged as the ‘younger’ medium to watch the IPL, as 85 per cent of the total viewership on the platform came from viewers below the age of 35 years. The biggest chunk of viewers were in the 18-24 year age group at 48 per cent, while 37 per cent of the IPL viewers on Hotstar were between 25 and 34 years of age.

Reliance Jio, Vivo, Samsung, Kotak, Vodafone and Oppo were among the most popular brands in this year’s IPL.