The IPL 2025 tasted paramount success in terms of viewership this year. Part of it goes down to Virat Kohli and Royal Challengers Bengaluru making it to the final and winning their maiden IPL title.
However, a lot boils down to the strategy that was in place to make the viewership as much as it was by the end of the season. IPL 2025 was India’s biggest sports broadcast in terms of reach but brought back the maximum revenue as well.
The season saw participation from over 425 advertisers, including 270 first-time brands across 40 unique categories. Furthermore, it generated a lot of revenue through advertising to measure which, JioStar used third-party measurement through Nielsen.
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IPL 2025 Raises The Bar Of Sports Viewership In India
Speaking at the APOS 2025 summit in Bali, JioStar CEO Sanjog Gupta spoke about one of the key reasons why the league made so much business this year. He spoke about how a strategic investment they made came up with the results as desired. He said that JioStar invested more than $500 million to build a platform-led sports ecosystem over the past 15 years to make the user interface easier for its users.
“While numbers around acquisition prices for sports rights tend to be thrown around a lot, what at times gets missed is the sheer investment that a network such as ours has made to grow those properties,” Gupta said. That cumulative investment across marketing, production and technology over the last decade and a half has crossed half a billion dollars. “That is outside of what we paid for the acquisition of rights" Gupta said.
Talking about numbers, JioHotstar now has over 300 million subscribers and recorded 1.04 billion app downloads during the season. The viewership in mobile touched 417 million, while connected TVs (CTVs) added another 235 million. The final alone drew a viewership of 426 million viewers—189 million on TV and 237 million on digital.
“We’ve built a platform for infinite consumer journeys—where every fan can have a personalized, immersive experience depending on the device, language and level of engagement,” he said.
Gupta also spoke about driving revenue on JioStar through other sports including Football, Kabaddi. He also said making the games reach to their users in local languages has increased the engagement of users on the platform across various devices.
Sanjog Gupta On IPL 2025
About IPL 2025, he said that the season got a lot more emotionally attached to its customers.
“This was a season where the lines between sport, storytelling, and shared experiences truly blurred. It’s no longer about just broadcasting matches, it’s about making every moment move millions" he concluded saying.
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