Gaming
SonyLIV basks in football glory, EURO 2020 viewership outstrips FIFA 2018
New Delhi: SonyLIV continues to make the most of the football fever that has swept the country over the last few weeks. The home-grown OTT platform is streaming the football action LIVE from UEFA EURO 2020 since it began on 11 June and has already clocked a total of 14 million hours of streaming.
According to the platform, the engagement level of users has increased ever since the sporting extravaganza started on 11 June, and it is now gearing up for the finals to be held in Wembley, London on 11 July.
“Before the final kick-off, Euro has already outdone the FIFA world cup 2018 views and watch time,” it said on Wednesday, with a remarkable rise in viewership with matches like Portugal vs Germany, followed by Croatia vs Spain, France vs Switzerland, and England vs Germany from the playoff stage (Round of 16). The Portugal vs Germany match on 19 June (Saturday) was among the most watched in the tournament. The defending champion Portugal led by Cristiano Ronaldo was defeated by 4-2 in the match in the group stage despite the ace player’s goal and an assist.
SonyLIV had sold out 100 per cent of its inventory with seven sponsors onboard which included WazirX, Cred, Acko General Insurance, Dell Technologies, Mahindra, Betway and Black&White, said SonyLIV, Ad Sales and revenue head, Ranjana Mangla.
“Euro 2020 has been a great tournament for us. We successfully sold out 100 per cent of our inventory with seven sponsors and more than 35 brands from across categories like Auto, Electronics, Banking, Finance, Insurance, Technology & FMCG. During this period Spotlight Roadblocks on the platform have also been a huge hit amongst advertisers,” said Mangla.
According to the platform, Euro 2020 is being viewed across more than 400 cities in India and has recorded significantly higher viewership from football loving states like West Bengal, Northeast, Kerala and Goa. “Also, the streaming of the matches in six different languages has seen encouraging traction in smaller non-metro cities. The uptake of subscriptions in non-metros has doubled as that of metro cities,” it said in a statement.
Riding high on the success of Euro 2020, the platform is now gearing up to on-board more advertisers for Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as well as the upcoming line-up of global sporting events.
Talking about the association with SonyLIV, WazirX founder and CEO Nischal Shetty said, the success of Euro 2020 drew a great number of viewers and that has helped us engage better with our target audience. “Associating with a platform that caters to a vast audience with their various entertainment offerings has been a great association,” he added.
Another sponsor, ACKO, EVP Marketing Ashish Mishra said, “Our association with SonyLIV has been a fruitful one as it helps ACKO reach niche audiences across top cities. They have some great live sports content lined up, starting with the Euro 2020 which has been a huge success, bringing in diverse viewers. Our goal was to introduce the brand to newer audiences and through this partnership we successfully managed to get the desired reach and have continued to stay top-of-mind.”
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
