Hotstar Shatters Records on Digital Sponsorships on Vivo IPL 2017
Vivo and Maruti Suzuki on board as co-presenting sponsors
Mumbai, Mar 10th 2017: Hotstar, India’s leading OTT platform, has announced Vivo and Maruti Suzuki as the co-presenting sponsors for the streaming of the 10th edition of the Vivo Indian Premier League 2017. While numbers have not been publicly disclosed, both the sponsorships are believed to be sizable investments from the two companies of a scale that has not been seen in the Indian digital market to date and indicate their belief in Hotstar’s promise of delivering the largest global sporting event on digital this summer.
Over the last few weeks, Hotstar has been sharing viewership insights that suggest explosive growth in cricket viewership and a meaningful shift in audiences from television to digital. The most recent India vs England ODI series saw Hotstar’s reach challenging that of television consistently. The reach hit 120% of television in cities with more than a million in population and 147% reach in the largest 6 cities in India (M15+, NCCS AB). At the same time, the platform has seen new records established for digital with the short format cricket matches regularly exceeding 20 million in viewership.
“We are reinventing the experience of cricket on a mobile and India is changing the way it watches its favourite sport,” said Ajit Mohan, CEO, Hotstar. “We believe that Hotstar will be the primary screen for Vivo IPL 2017 for the 130 million video streamers in the country. Marketers are recognizing that these are audiences that are TV light or not present on television at all. We are delighted with the conviction that Hotstar will be the best vehicle this summer to reach this audience.”
Vivek Zhang, CMO, Vivo India said, “It is exciting to see how the experience of enjoying cricket is changing with the surging demand of watching TV on small screens. Hotstar appeals to the youth and enjoys a tremendous brand recall. Its desire to constantly invest on innovative technology which is in line with Vivo’s marketing objectives made it a preferred choice for Vivo.
We are truly excited about the delightful cricket experience that the platform is driving and were indeed keen to be a part of this drive.”
Sanjeev Handa, Head of Marketing at Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, said “Our approach to media at Maruti Suzuki is customer centric. More and more of our target groups are now engaging with us on digital mediums. There is a diffusion of purchase cycle within digital since 50% of users start their research online which makes it imperative for us to be present extensively on these mediums. Hence our approach is integrating offline and online. We wanted to embody the spirit of Play Glamourous for Vitara Brezza across the markets, and found a perfect fit by reaching out to the audiences via their closest screens i.e. mobiles. An average user is spending over 150 mins each day on mobile. Our tie up as Co-Presenting Sponsor on Hotstar will give us the mileage and the engagement with the most glamourous sport in the nation!”
About Hotstar:
Hotstar is India’s largest premium streaming platform with more than 1, 00,000 hours of drama and movies in 8 languages, and coverage of every major global sporting event. Launched in February 2015, it raced on to become one of the fastest adopted new apps anywhere in the world and has been downloaded by more than 200 million users on the back of a highly evolved video streaming technology and high attention to quality of experience across devices and platforms. Hotstar offers most of its content free of cost and introduced a pay wall in 2016 Hotstar Premium that provides some of the most popular international TV series, films and sports from across the world for a monthly subscription fee of Rs. 199.Hotstar appropriated the top spot on iTunes as Apple TV’s App of the Year for India 2016.
