The television (TV) viewership numbers of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2023 have dropped as per the latest Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) statistics. The latest BARC study says that the opening game of the season between the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and the Gujarat Titans (GT) garnered a 22 per cent reach , Moneycontrol reports.
Official broadcaster Star claims that they have recorded a 30 per cent growth in viewership in comparison to the previous season of the tournament. However, the BARC figures seem to have challenged the same with a significant section of the audience even shifting to watch the IPL games through the digital medium on the JioCinema application.
A repeat of last season?
Even last year, the TV viewership in the first week of IPL 2022 was found to be 33 per cent less than that recorded in the same time frame of the preceding season, i.e., IPL 2021. In total, the overall viewership on TV for IPL 2022 was 14 per cent less with respect to the numbers locked in for the entirety of IPL 2021. Hence, the trends observed at least in the opening week of the ongoing campaign also seem to be a repeat of what has been observed in the last year or so.
In fact, the CSK vs GT game had a TVR of 7.29, which is the second-lowest figure amongst the first games of the last six seasons of the tournament, according to BARC (M15+ AB India Urban). The lowest in the previous six years was the 5.57 TVR seen for the CSK vs Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) curtain raiser game in IPL 2022.
Is JioCinema taking over the bragging rights?
This is already a big shift from the initial heydays of the league when it used to consistently top the TVR charts and attract premium advertising rates for properties around major events such as the opening day, finals, and marquee matches during the course of the tournament.
Meanwhile, JioCinema has reported that more than six crore unique viewers tuned in for the CSK vs GT game and that its total match views for that encounter breached the 50 crore mark.
The latest figures from the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) suggests that people are increasingly moving away from watching the IPL on television with official digital rights holder JioCinema posting record viewership numbers for the opening game of the season between the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and Gujarat Titans (GT).
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