JioStar banks on $500 mn engine to sustain IPL as India's most monetized league

MUMBAI: With a staggering 1.19 billion viewers and over 514 billion minutes of watch time, Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025 has set a new benchmark for live sports in India. But behind the record numbers is a strategic gamble that Sanjog Gupta, chief executive—sports and live experiences, JioStar, says goes far beyond cricket.

Speaking at the APOS 2025 summit in Bali, Gupta revealed that the company has pumped more than $500 million to build a platform-led sports ecosystem, in addition to the rights acquisition costs, over the past 15 years.

“While numbers around acquisition prices for sports rights tend to be thrown around a lot, what at times gets missed is the sheer investment that a network such as ours has made to grow those properties,” Gupta said. That cumulative investment across marketing, production and technology over the last decade and a half has crossed half a billion dollars. “That is outside of what we paid for the acquisition of rights.”

The payoff? Tata IPL 2025 has emerged not only as India’s biggest sports broadcast in terms of reach, but also its most monetised. The season saw participation from over 425 advertisers, including 270 first-time brands across 40 unique categories.

JioStar also introduced third-party measurement through Nielsen for 32 brands, pushing for more transparency and performance-linked advertising metrics.

JioHotstar, the digital home of the cricket league, now has over 300 million subscribers and recorded 1.04 billion app downloads during the season, Gupta said. Viewership on mobile touched 417 million, while connected TVs (CTVs) added another 235 million. The IPL final alone drew 426 million viewers—189 million on TV and 237 million on digital—with a peak concurrency, or the maximum number of viewers watching simultaneously on the two platforms, of 55.2 million.

More than the scale, Gupta emphasized the shift in design philosophy. “We’ve built a platform for infinite consumer journeys—where every fan can have a personalized, immersive experience depending on the device, language and level of engagement,” he said.

This meant deploying features like MaxView 3.0 (a vertical, multi-camera experience used by 30% of mobile viewers), 360-degree VR streaming, voice-assisted search on CTV, AI-powered instant highlights and even Indian Sign Language interpretation. For 44% of mobile viewers, the tournament also became interactive, with the play-along game ‘Jeeto Dhan Dhana Dhan’ becoming a hit.

Yet, all of this came with a clear goal: to turn sport from an episodic event into a full-blown content funnel. “Sport is our strongest recruitment funnel,” Gupta said. “The idea is to bring fans in during live events and then take them on a broader content journey, whether it’s an original series like Criminal Justice, or a Hindi entertainment show promoted off the back of a live match.”

This ecosystem-driven thinking is at the heart of JioStar’s monetization model, which blends free access, deep engagement and eventual subscription. “It’s not ‘pay at the gate’. Our model mirrors real life, you walk into a mall, explore and then decide what to buy. That’s how we want users to experience content,” Gupta explained.

While IPL remains its flagship event, JioStar has also been growing other sports properties. Gupta claimed that viewership of the English Premier League on their platforms has grown 3.5x in the past five years, thanks to regional language feeds and cultural localization. At the other end of the spectrum, he said, kabaddi is being nurtured into a year-round proposition.

“We’re not trying to be known for one genre—we want to shape India’s entire media consumption economy.”

Demographic data from IPL 2025 supports that ambition. Nearly half (47%) of Star Sports viewers were women. Regional language viewership surged—Telugu rose 87%, Tamil 52%, Kannada 65% and Haryanvi 47% year-on-year, making the tournament one of the most localised national events in India’s media history.

The strategy rests on what Gupta calls the four pillars of the digital media economy: attention (reaching the user), passion (getting them to care), affiliation (making them loyal) and action (getting them to act). “No genre activates all four segments as well as live sport,” he said, making a case for sports as a core growth engine, not just content.

Still, for all its highs, the model will be tested on sustainability. Offering free access at the entry point, building heavy tech layers and running personalised infrastructure for a billion-plus base is capital-intensive. Gupta is betting that scale, segmentation and cross-genre monetization will make the equation work.

IPL 2025, he said, “was a season where the lines between sport, storytelling, and shared experiences truly blurred. It’s no longer about just broadcasting matches, it’s about making every moment move millions.”

The stakes are immense, the investment deep and the expectations sky-high. Whether JioStar’s $500 million engine can keep firing at full throttle across seasons will decide not just the future of IPL, but the blueprint for India’s next digital media leap.