India’s Gen Z are driving the future of sports consumption

You might have noticed that India has changed. It is no longer a plucky, postcolonial underdog. It’s where the future of our industry is being shaped by an educated, confident, ambitious generation convinced that we are living in the Indian century.

India has more than 1.4bn people. Half of them are under 30. And it is this segment that is driving change in how sport is consumed, even more than young people in North America and Western Europe.

A big reason is the simple arithmetic: there’s more of them and they’re getting richer. But they also love sport and are increasingly connected to global digital culture – and its associated economy.

As western executives brace themselves for the collapse of linear television and the great unknown beyond, the future of sports media has already arrived in a Kolkata dhaba (see: glossary), the back of a rickshaw in Delhi, or a teenager’s bedroom in a Mumbai high-rise.

Digital first

The three biggest sports properties in India, the ones every broadcaster wants, though in most cases can’t afford, are: the Indian Premier League (the big tamasha masquerading as a T20 tournament); the International Cricket Council’s events (basically World Cups, which India really should win more of); and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (home matches of the Indian team, which it wins most of).

All of them sold their media rights in India in the last year or so, and in all three cases, the value of the digital rights was greater than that for linear broadcast rights.

This sort of thing, even separating linear and digital rights, let alone the latter surpassing the former in value, isn’t happening much elsewhere.

Not yet, anyway.

In the United States, perhaps the biggest story in sports media consumption over the past year has been the problems faced by regional sports networks. This issue has come about because the cable pay-television bundle is no longer what it was – consumers want to spend their money only on the content they want, when and where they want it.

Digital services have filled the void as a result, streaming content direct to the consumer. In many cases, the teams themselves are the owners of these new regional and local platforms.

The slow, painful transition from linear to digital in the US is, in India, happening as a crushing tidal wave. India-based media groups are acquiring sports media rights with digital consumption as their first and sometimes only consideration. There will be no going back.

Vertical challenge

This autumn’s ICC Cricket World Cup felt like a massive Indian mela, cementing a wider feeling that the sport now belongs to the country.

The commercial growth of cricket in India continues to drive the sport’s media rights revenues upward, resulting in the highest compound annual growth rate from 2019 to 2026 of any sport globally.

It’s not just the viewership and revenues which are significant, but the changes in consumption habits – most notably, how more and more people in India are watching cricket on their phones.

The sport is, of course, still best viewed as part of a group or community: the family huddled together in the living room to watch the big match; or, in rural India, the village gathered around the big screen. But this is 2023 and people are busy.

Think of the taxi driver stuck in Bangalore traffic; the college kid who has a ten-minute break between engineering classes at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur; the domestic cleaner in Chennai, going from apartment to apartment, who just has to know if Virat Kohli has got his century.

In India, these consumers are dictating how sport is packaged. Digital isn’t a creeping trend – it is the centre of every media group’s strategy.

The ICC Cricket World Cup, held from October 5 to November 19, was the first major global tournament to offer a vertical feed for mobile consumption. ICC TV, supported by Disney Star, produced an additional vertical video feed alongside its standard feed, that it said would “revolutionize fans’ viewing experience.” This wasn’t just about cropping their standard world feed and putting it out for mobile consumption. The two entities used dedicated, vertically-oriented cameras alongside their standard cameras for the world feed.

Every one of the ten World Cup venues had six additional cameras for specific mobile-centred coverage. ICC TV and Disney also built a new graphics package for the vertical screen and adopted a different directorial approach for the format.

This change is more profound than some young Indians watching sport on a smaller screen and non-horizontally. As pay-television starts to reckon with the end of its 30-year run of steady growth, sport is asking how it begins to think about replacing its most important revenue stream.

Television, and the collective consumption model in general, doesn’t offer much in the way of engagement with the content on screen. Individual consumption on a personal screen, i.e. the phone, provides the opportunity for interactivity and thus the ‘stickiness’ that rights-holders crave.

The vertical format also caters to how sport is consumed more and more – with online communities. We need to be able to scroll down, toggle between apps, share gaalis about underperforming players with our mates on chat groups.

And the data shows this is necessary. A report from Nielsen and LaLiga Tech last year, which surveyed 20,000 people, found that nearly half (46%) of younger fans (under 34) expressed a preference for watching sport on smartphones or tablets.

Production needs to keep up or young consumers will go elsewhere – to TikTok, to Instagram, to better user experiences. In India, this has meant basing vertical production on eye-tracking studies to better understand viewership on six-inch screens.

As ever, you have to pay attention to the details. Most vertical feeds have been produced in 9:16, but the World Cup in India has been produced in a 9:14 vertical aspect ratio in order to fit most mobile screens.

Input-output

These changes in output are all being driven by the inputs – i.e. the tech and infrastructural advances in the country.

5G was launched at the India Mobile Congress in 2022. By August this year, the Indian government said the country had the second largest 5G network in the world, with 300,000 sites set up in 10 months. There are reportedly over 100 million 5G users in India already, according to the country’s two major telcos, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel.

In India, technical and infrastructural improvements have also made vertical feeds possible to roll out at scale. In recent years, video resolution has improved, largely due to improved compression and delivery tech. Another important factor is that India has relatively low mobile data costs.

Women’s (media and sponsorship) rights

If you watched an India match during the Cricket World Cup, you might have heard the home fans sing a version of an ode called Vande Mataram, which in Sanskrit means “I bow to thee, Mother”.

This wasn’t 60,000 Indian men spontaneously thanking their mother for buying their tickets to the match. Rather, an expression of patriotism which has, at its heart, a sense of the ‘motherland’. And, one hopes, a small part of a much-needed recalibration of views on gender equality in a country where female deities are worshipped up and down the land on a daily basis.

Now, remember how there are more than 1.4bn Indians? Half of them are women. That means a lot of women consumers and also a lot of potential women sports stars.

This year saw the inaugural Women’s Premier League cricket competition. It started big and will only get bigger, beginning as the second most valuable women’s league in the world in media rights terms, behind only the WNBA.

India’s Gen Z is going to make massive stars out of women over the coming years, driving a change in consumption that is also – belatedly – taking place in other markets.

Scale matters

India might be number one in population, but it came 48th in the medal table at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

On social media, however, it won. The most mentioned athlete in the world during the Games was India’s javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra. Scale matters and drives engagement – the foundation of developing revenue streams for sport in what is now a brutal attention economy.

Sport has an advantage in India compared to other markets. A huge, captive audience for cricket has created competition among its biggest media groups, which have been forced to make premium sport available for free as they battle to expand their user bases and drive them to paid services such as telephony, ecommerce and entertainment content subscriptions.

By making the Cricket World Cup available for free on its OTT platform Hotstar, Disney Star recorded peak viewership of 35 million on the platform during the match between India and Pakistan on October 14. This was a new global sports streaming record after 32.1 million viewers watched the Indian Premier League final earlier this year. A week later, for India v New Zealand, the record was broken again, with a peak of 43 million viewers.

It’s not just Disney Star bringing down the paywall. In the last year, media group Viacom18 – majority-owned by the conglomerate Reliance Industries – has made the Fifa World Cup and Indian Premier League freely available on mobile platforms.

It’s important to note that in India, as with elsewhere, live linear sports viewership still outpaces digital numbers. Indeed, the highest IPL peak concurrency on linear television for this year’s IPL was the 64.1 million viewers Disney Star hit during the final, emphasising the enduring primacy of linear sports broadcasting in India, at least for now.

However, India’s sports media market already has one foot in a mobile, digital future.