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Key Takeaways
“We have beds in our new office,” a 20-something producer at JioCinema told his friends in the fall of 2022. A relatively new hire at the company, he had a ringside view of the flurry of activity at the OTT platform as it prepared to stream its first real showpiece event—the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Besides making dorm-like arrangements for employees who were required to work late nights, Viacom18—JioCinema’s parent company—also moved its sports division and production studios to a swanky new property in South Mumbai. It even poached scores of seasoned executives from arch-rival Disney Star. Viacom18 now counts Uday Shankar—the former high-ranking Disney executive who’d launched Hotstar in 2015—as an investor. On a fully diluted basis, Bodhi Tree Systems, a joint venture between Shankar and media scion James Murdoch, holds a 13% stake in Viacom18.
The FIFA World Cup in late-2022 catapulted JioCinema from five years of relative obscurity—as Viacom18 had been focused on its other streaming bet, Voot—into the public consciousness. Over the course of the tournament, the platform attracted 110 million viewers, with India’s digital viewership of a global sporting event surpassing TV viewership for the first time. JioCinema also became the most downloaded free app on Android and iOS, according to app tracker data.ai (earlier App Annie).
Cut to seven months later, over 97 million viewers are said to have streamed IPL 2023 every day on JioCinema, with the league’s cumulative digital reach projected to be north of 500 million. JioCinema recorded 17 billion video views during IPL 2023—a worldwide streaming record for cricket events. The platform also repeatedly broke global records for concurrent viewership of a live-streamed event.
It wasn't long before the wider industry was compelled to acknowledge JioCinema as a genuine challenger to current market leader Disney+ Hotstar (53 million subscribers), Amazon Prime Video (20-25 million subscribers), and Netflix (7-8 million subscribers). JioCinema continues to be the leading free app in India, with downloads soaring past the 100 million-mark earlier in 2023.
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