Sports
T20 World Cup 2026 breaks records with 500m viewers in India
JioHotstar peak of 60.5m as knockouts promise bigger moments
NEW DELHI: The game’s most explosive international format has delivered its biggest audience yet. The ICC T20 World Cup 2026 has smashed viewership records in India, drawing more than 500 million viewers so far, the highest ever for a T20 World Cup.
The milestone was shared by ICC chairman Jay Shah, who described the numbers as a testament to the tournament’s ambition of becoming the most global and accessible edition to date. As television sets flickered across cities and villages alike, digital screens were equally abuzz. Streaming platform JioHotstar recorded a peak of 60.5 million concurrent viewers, underscoring the sport’s growing digital appetite.
In a post on X, Shah said the tournament began with a clear vision to widen cricket’s footprint and make it more accessible to fans everywhere. Crossing the 500 million mark in India, he noted, was both humbling and historic.
The timing could not be better. With the knockout stage now under way, the competition is poised to intensify on the pitch and on the screen. If early figures are anything to go by, the closing chapters may well rewrite the record books once again.
For a format built on quick thrills and bold strokes, the T20 World Cup is proving that when it comes to fan engagement, it knows how to play the long game too.
Sports
KKR takes Korbo, Lorbo, Jeetbo across India in seven languages this IPL season
From a four-storey mural in Kolkata to team buses in Chennai and Ahmedabad, KKR is turning a cricket campaign into a cultural one
KOLKATA: Kolkata Knight Riders have never been shy about making noise. This IPL season, they are making it in seven languages.
The franchise has rolled out one of the more ambitious branding exercises of the TATA IPL 2026 season, combining a sprawling outdoor campaign in its home city with a travelling multilingual initiative that takes the team’s iconic slogan, Korbo, Lorbo, Jeetbo, into the regional language of every away city it plays in.
In Kolkata, the campaign is impossible to miss. More than 75,000 square feet of outdoor space has been commandeered across the city, encompassing 65 billboards at key locations, branded pillars and pole kiosks along major routes, LED boards and metro branding. The centrepiece is a hand-painted mural across the full face of a four-storey building on Rashbehari Avenue near Bijan Setu. Inspired by the theme Prothom Bhalobasha KKR, meaning “first love” in Bengali, the mural features players Varun Chakravarthy, Ajinkya Rahane and Rinku Singh alongside the franchise’s famous rallying cry. It has already become a fan pilgrimage site, drawing crowds and generating considerable traction on social media.
Beyond Kolkata, KKR is doing something rather cleverer. As the team travels for away fixtures, its team bus carries the franchise slogan translated into the local language of each host city. The campaign began in Mumbai ahead of KKR’s first away game on 29th March, with the Marathi adaptation on display. Over the course of the season, the initiative will span seven cities and seven languages: Marathi in Mumbai, Tamil in Chennai, Gujarati in Ahmedabad, Hindi in Lucknow and Delhi, Telugu in Hyderabad, and Chhattisgarhi in Raipur.
Binda Dey, chief marketing officer of Knight Riders Sports, was candid about what the campaign is trying to achieve. “This season, we wanted to go beyond visibility and create moments of genuine cultural connection for our fans,” she said. “When fans in Chennai see Korbo, Lorbo, Jeetbo in Tamil, or fans in Ahmedabad see it in Gujarati, we want that to feel like a moment of recognition, not just advertising. Combined with our outdoor campaign in Kolkata that gives us mass visibility in our home market, we’re building a campaign that is as much about identity and pride as it is about cricket.”
The branding push sits alongside a wider set of fan engagement initiatives this season, including Knights Unplugged 3.0, the VIDA Knights Electrifying Box Cricket tournament and fan meet-ups across cities.
KKR, it is worth remembering, is not merely a cricket team. The Knight Riders brand spans four franchises across four countries, with nine trophies between them, including three IPL titles in 2012, 2014 and 2024. It is one of the more commercially sophisticated operations in world T20 cricket, and this campaign reflects that instinct precisely. In a sport where every franchise is chasing the same eyeballs, KKR has decided that the smartest way to stand out is not to shout louder, but to speak in the right tongue. Seven cities, seven languages, one battle cry. The purple and gold, it turns out, travels rather well.
