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At the inaugural edition of the e4m GroupM Let’s Play sports marketing summit, Vibhor Gauba, Associate Partner – Deal Advisory at KPMG India, delivered a keynote address.
The address delved deep into the recently launched and highly lauded CII-KPMG report on the state of the Indian sports broadcasting industry in 2022, its recent wins, and future hopes. According to that report, the sports TV broadcasting segment has been calculated to be ₹7,560 crore in 2022, with the digital OTT sports sector estimated to be around ₹1,970 crore, with overall revenues for sports broadcasting coming up to ₹9,530 crore. According to the same report, just the TV sports broadcasting segment by itself is expected to grow to ₹9,830 crore in FY26, increasing at a steady CAGR of 7 per cent.
“We looked at the sector from two lenses, the first being TV broadcasting. In that segment, IPL is obviously the largest property, and we examined how effectively sport is being broadcast on TVs and how that can be best utilized. And then moving on, we also examined it from the digital angle, given that it has increasingly dominated conversations ever since Jio introduced its data plans in late 2016,” he said.
Gauba went on to elucidate on how there had been an uptick in worries about increased cord-cutting, the death of some genres of TV and other similar industry concerns.
As per the latest BARC data we had, we’re currently at 210 million households, and the overall penetration of TV is close to 70 per cent, so out of the close to 300 million households we have, we only have 210 million that have a TV, meaning 90 million have never had a TV set, so there is still a big gap,” he elaborated.
To crunch out more facts from that data point, the report compared the percentage of rural households in India with TVs, pegged at around 60 per cent, against that of other SouthEast Asian countries, with similar GDPs as measured by Purchasing Power Parity, and found that they had anywhere between 80-95 per cent penetration.
“Obviously we’re not likely to reach those levels, as India’s actual GDP is slightly lower than that of some of those countries, but growing TV penetration to 70-80% is something that is very achievable,” said Gauba.
When it came to cord-cutting, Gauba acknowledged it to be a reality in that a small number of households and high net worth individuals were turning away from linear TV, but the numbers were too small to pose a threat to it, coming in at barely 0.5 to 0.7 households in India.
Noting that seamless 5G connections across the country, requiring only a single data package were still a couple of years away, Gauba said, “What we shouldn’t forget is that TV is extremely affordable in India, and at ₹153 is all it costs to watch a 100 FTA channels. So while 5G is going to have an impact on cord-cutting, it won’t make a material difference to the number of households with TVs, and we see only 10-15 million households cutting the chord in the next four years.”
He added that it was interesting to note that, between 2019 to 2022, when digital consumption really skyrocketed across the country, TV managed to retain its market share of 52-54 per cent, as digital had mostly moved into other segments of media consumption.
“What’s a really interesting data point we found, especially from an advertiser’s perspective is that New Consumer Classification System (NCCS) A and B penetration in TV households has increased by 17 per cent, so the households we would have expected to be the first to cut the cord have not done so up till now,” said Gauba.
He added that the volume of original content on TV is unparalleled, noting, “If you look at any GEC, you’re getting four to four and a half hours of original content every evening of the week, during prime time, and that is not something that digital can cover any time soon.”
“So TV is here to stay, and the sports category remains one of the most popular and most monetizable genres. If we look at the Super Bowl of India, the IPL, we saw that it reached out to between 400-420 million people, and is greater than the combined reach of other top properties, for which we looked at KBC, Bigg Boss, Kapil Sharma, Khatron keKhiladi, and Shark Tank. In the two months that it is taking place, it has greater reach than all these properties combined, and it has 2x the amount in terms of watch time,” explained Gauba.
“If we look at concurrent viewers, meaning those watching via TV and those watching through OTT, and look at a match of say India vs Pakistan, which exceeds even IPL, then the T-20 World Cup 2021 match had 116 million users on TV versus 12.8 million on digital,” he said.
This means that TV will continue to dwarf digital for the foreseeable future, because even if digital adoption is growing at a greater exponential rate, TV has a far larger base.
“And while IPL is obviously the largest property, because of all the money it brought into the sector, a lot of non-cricket events also rose in prominence, predominantly PKL and ISL, and while they may never get as big as IPL, they cater to different sections of the audience and each reaches to between 150-300 million viewers in a particular season,” said Gauba, concluding that TV is not going anywhere any time soon, and is only going to increase in terms of opportunities for brands, advertisers, and the media industry.
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