The 2023 edition of the highly anticipated Men’s ODI Cricket World Cup is all set to commence next week from 5th October and the final match will be played on 19th November. As all cricket buffs might already know that the World Cup will be broadcast in India on Star Sports television channel and the Disney+ Hotstar OTT platform. And the great thing about it is that the tournament will be streaming on Disney+ Hotstar for free on all mobile devices.
The decision to stream the high-profile Cricket World Cup tournament for free on Disney+ Hotstar has come at a critical time when the OTT giant is longer the streaming home for premium HBO titles like ‘The Last of Us’, ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Succession’, etc. besides earlier setbacks including losing out on IPL 2023 rights and not streaming the F1 2023 season as well.
The motive behind streaming the World Cup for free on Disney+ Hotstar is apparently simple. The basic idea is to retain and expand the OTT subscriber base and to generate a significant amount of advertising revenue through the tournament. Somewhat similar to Jio Cinema’s previous masterstroke of making the massively popular IPL 2023 cricket tournament available for streaming free of cost.
And the icing on the cake for Disney+ Hotstar is that as per sources in the media industry (reported via Financial Express), the advertising rates for the Cricket World Cup 2023 have significantly increased for digital. Because the asking rate has significantly gone up from around Rs.140-150 per thousand impressions / CPM (cost per mille) for World Cup 2019 to around Rs.230-250 per thousand impressions for the Cricket World Cup 2023. This means that the current rates for digital have increased by around a whopping 64-67% compared to 2019.
On Star Sports too, the spot advertising rates for World Cup 2023 have more than doubled to around Rs.30 lakh per ten seconds from Rs.15 lakh for the 2019 World Cup. The reason for these increased ad rates might also be because this World Cup is happening during the Dussehra-Diwali festival period. So, it looks like Cricket World Cup 2023 streaming for free on Disney+ Hotstar is a win-win situation both for the streaming giant and for OTT viewers.
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