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Hotstar, Disney's Indian Streaming Service, Sets New Global Record For Live Viewership (techcrunch.com) 28

Indian video streaming giant Hotstar, owned by Disney, today set a new global benchmark for the number of people an OTT service can draw to a live event. From a report: Some 18.6 million users simultaneously tuned into Hotstar's website and app to watch the deciding game of the 12th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament. The streaming giant, which competes with Netflix and Amazon in India, broke its own "global best" 10.3 million concurrent views milestone that it had set last year. Hotstar topped the 10 million concurrent viewership mark a number of times during this year's 51-day IPL season. More than 12.7 million viewers huddled to watch an earlier game in the tournament, a spokesperson for the four-year-old service said. In mid-April, Hotstar said that the cricket series had already garnered a 267 million overall viewership, creating a new record for the streamer. (Last year's IPL had clocked a 202 million overall viewership.) These figures coming out of India, the fastest-growing internet market, are astounding to say the least. In comparison, a 2012 live stream of skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumping from near-space to the Earth's surface, remains the most concurrently viewed video on YouTube. It amassed about 8 million concurrent viewers.
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Hotstar, Disney's Indian Streaming Service, Sets New Global Record For Live Viewership

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  • PewDiePie know about this? /h

  • Wow..that many people for cricket....really?

    OH well, guess they see something more in it than I do, but to each their own.

    • by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @11:23AM (#58584164)

      Wow..that many people for cricket....really?

      Absolutely. Cricket is wildly popular in India and a few other places. A few million people in country with a population over a billion watching the country's most popular sport is hardly shocking. It's not like there is something special about the sports we play here that make them inherently more or less entertaining than cricket,

      OH well, guess they see something more in it than I do, but to each their own.

      I'm sure your hobbies are just of as little interest to a lot of people in India. Same with mine. I'm not a cricket fan myself but it's easy to understand how it might be popular with the right demographic. The rest of the world thinks the US is weird for not being utterly obsessed with what they call football and we call soccer.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      or you could have the "world series" - in which no one outside of USA cares about or competes in...
      or the world cup cricket which starts later this month in England, in which actually a world cup consisting of...

        England
        Australia
        Bangladesh
        India
        New Zealand
        Pakistan
        South Africa
        Sri Lanka
        Afghanistan
        West Indies

      but each to their own...

  • The sort of thing Guinness would love, but most people wouldn’t even think about.

    There have been, of course, larger audiences for live events shown on traditional television - larger by much more than an order of magnitude. World Cup, Super Bowl, etc.

    • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      There have been, of course, larger audiences for live events shown on traditional television - larger by much more than an order of magnitude. World Cup, Super Bowl, etc.

      There's the rub. It's India, so there is a much lower barrier of entry for the individual consumer to streaming video than there is television. A streaming device such as a phone is probably their main form of media consumption, especially since it is more multi-use than a TV is. This is a common effect in emerging and developing markets, since the infrastructure for cell phones is easier than that for TV, particularly in more rural areas.

  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Monday May 13, 2019 @04:28PM (#58586524) Journal
    Cricket has evolved from staid national teams playing test cricket wearing all whites. 5 day match, with a rest day in the middle, lunch break, tea break drinks, and after two innings it used often end in a draw.

    This IPL is modeled after NFL. Fast match. 120 pitches for each team. No draw, very rare ties. Very exciting. Lots of strategy and lots of rules to make the game very entertaining. Celebrity owners, team jersey sales, teams based on metros, lots of local fan following. NFL mania is nothing compared to the cricket mania in India.

  • ...that this is Thrones' last season?

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