BREAKING NEWS FROM THE STREAMING SECTOR
HOTSTAR SETS RECORD FOR LIVE CONCURRENT STREAMS
Hotstar, India’s Disney-owned streaming service, has set a global benchmark for the number of people an OTT service can draw to a live event. Over 18.6 million users simultaneously logged in to the deciding game of the 12th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament. The figure marks another milestone for the streaming giant with Hotstar breaking its own previous
world record of 10.3 million viewers, which it set last year. Hotstar topped the 10 million concurrent viewership mark multiple times during the 51-day IPL season. Early in the tournament, more than 12.7 million cricket fans watched Royal Challengers Bangalore take on Mumbai Indians. Overall, the series gained over 300 million viewers. Last year’s IPL clocked a 202 million overall viewership.
The scale of the figures becomes clearer when compared to, for example, YouTube’s most popular live broadcast. The 2012 livestream of skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumping from the stratosphere to the Earth amassed eight million concurrent viewers. In the last two years, Hotstar has expanded overseas – to the US, Canada and, most recently, the UK – in order to chase new audiences.
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