Cricket continued to remain Indian sports aficionados' favorite sports to be watched on Television sets in 2022. This is according to Axis My India India Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI) published for 2022.
The data intelligence company Axis My India published a monthly analysis of consumer perception on a wide range of issues which it calls the India Consumer Sentiment Index or CSI.
One of the finer details that emerged while analyzing the media consumption habits of the people surveyed it emerged that cricket tends to rule the hearts of people. In fact, the so-talked-about FIFA World Cup had only one-third the takers, which actually is an improvement from past records, versus the T20 World Cup earlier that year.
Of the people surveyed in both rural and urban India, 46 percent mentioned that they liked watching the T20 World Cup, 25 percent liked to watch the IPL and 16 percent liked the FIFA World Cup.
2022 was the year that saw two major World Cup events. First was the ICC T20 World Cup which was hosted by Australia and played from October 16 to November 13. The cricket World Cup was soon followed by the FIFA World Cup in Qatar and was held from November 20 up until December 18.
There was also the regular season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) played during the Indian summers. The 2022 season of the IPL had 74 matches as two new teams, Gujarat Titans and Lucknow Super Giants, were welcomed into the league's fray.
ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2022 viewership
According to a media release dated December 15, 2022, published on ICC-cricket.com, the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2022 saw 6.58 billion video views across all ICC platforms, surpassing the Men’s T20 World Cup 2021 record by 65 percent and making it the most digitally engaged ICC event ever.
On web and app platforms there were 78.4 million visitors across the Men’s T20 World Cup, an all-time record and a 57 percent increase from last year’s edition. From a broadcast perspective, the overall cumulative global dedicated TV audience for Australia in 2022 was 1.28 billion.
Coverage across key markets saw the most watched match of the tournament, India versus Pakistan, accumulate 256 million viewing hours in India. There was also an overall 4 percent increase in average live linear TV viewership in India when compared to the most recent ICC men’s event held in Australia, driven by multi-language coverage in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada across the Star Network and Hotstar.
FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 viewership
Digital viewership shot past TV for the first time in India during the FIFA World Cup 2022. 110 million viewers saw the tournament on the JioCinema app, which streamed the tournament live for free.
Globally too, this World Cup was the first time that digital viewership surpassed TV. FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 held India’s attention with a mammoth 40 billion minutes of watch time being clocked across Sports18 and JioCinema.
While Sports18 was the official broadcast channel to show the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 on Indian TV sets, JioCinema was the online official streaming platform for the Indian territory.
TATA IPL 2022 viewership
While there was an uptick in the viewership of the ICC men's T20 World Cup 2022 and the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, it was not so good news for the TATA IPL 2022.
According to a report dated June 5 2022 on insidesport.in, for the first time ever in 15 years of the history of the league, the IPL Qualifiers, and IPL Eliminator have rated even lower than the matches of the league stage. The league attracted 229 million television viewers in the first week of the tournament’s 15th year, falling short of last year’s numbers.
According to data released by the Broadcast Audience Research Council India (BARC), a TV audience measurement firm, IPL had a reach of 267 million last year.
(Edited by : C H Unnikrishnan)
