Hotstar Prepares to Stream Cricket World Cup to U.S. Viewers

Efforts around the quadrennial competition are designed to boost the fanbase

You wouldn’t know it in the U.S., but cricket is the second-most-watched sport in the world. Even in the U.S., though, its popularity is growing, thanks to transplants from cricket-loving countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, South Africa, England, and Australia. And Hotstar International is working to grow that U.S. fanbase.

Hotstar International has been blowing away live-streaming records this year with the delivery of cricket matches to viewers across the globed. Even its performance in the U.S. has been impressive.

“Other than those diasporas, you don’t actually have a lot of cricket consumption in the U.S. at all,” notes Ipsita Dasgupta, president, Hotstar International, an India-based streaming service offering entertainment, sports, and live news. “It’s not a mainstream sport.”

But it’s still a sizable audience, and Hotstar is reaching out to it with a brand campaign focused on the upcoming ICC Cricket World Cup. Running May 30–July 14, the quadrennial competition is a big event for Hotstar. Ten nations will compete, and billions will watch. Four years ago, 2.2 billion people around the globe tuned in.

This year, Hotstar is expecting huge streaming numbers, having set a concurrent-streaming record during this month’s VIVO IPL cricket tournament when 18.6 million streamed it at the same time. Akamai was the CDN in charge of meeting that demand.

Tapping Into Memories of Home
The brand campaign is designed to evoke warm memories. Using the tagline “The feeling of home,” it aims to build a connection with viewers who live far from their birth country. Even in casual cricket fans, cheering for the “home team” during the World Cup can arouse powerful emotions.

“A lot of them actually tune it to watch the World Cup — [even if] they don’t watch other forms of cricket — because it’s their opportunity to root for Team India or Team Pakistan or Team Bangladesh or Team South Africa,” Dasgupta says. “It’s a really meaningful tournament because it’s a high-stakes international tournament.”

About 5 million South Asians now live in the U.S. and 1.8 million live in Canada, she says, noting that 70% of that latter group has lived in India at some point.

Programming Tailored to Five Cultures
Hotstar has special coverage lined up for its international viewers, starting with commentary in six languages: English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Bengali. Those last three are the fastest-growing languages in the U.S., Dasgupta notes. The five feeds won’t just be in different languages but will offer tailored cultural experiences and sports and entertainment stars as well. Stateside fans might have to get up at 3:30 in the morning to watch while their family sleeps, but, as a Hotstar ad promises, they’ll feel like they’re watching among friends. Other ads in the series make the same point.

Hotstar International’s Ipsita Dasgupta: “Hotstar wants to get behind the cause of increasing the popularity of cricket in the U.S.”

Besides live-streaming the games, Hotstar has plenty of supporting content planned, such as shows highlighting team strategies and the road to the World Cup. Fans can even catch US6: The Homecoming, a series Hotstar created last year for the IPL tournament that took six Indian-American cricketers back to the motherland to meet their cricket heroes.

A few months back, Hotstar created a live event to drum up excitement among U.S. viewers. CricFest brought in fans to meet cricket legends Anil Kumble and Virender Sehwag. Virtual-reality exhibits gave fans the chance to bat or bowl in a match. Full of food, fun, and stories, CricFest enabled parents to share their love of the game with their kids and, hopefully, helped create a new generation of devotees. The event has been held in New York and San Francisco. Some fans drove six hours to be part of it, Dasgupta says.

The U.S. national cricket team isn’t one of the 10 teams qualified to play in the upcoming tournament, which isn’t a surprise because it has never qualified. But that could change. Dasgupta has seen improvements in the team and believes it could surprise the world when the next cup qualifiers take place in 2022.

“We’re seeing that they’ve started to emerge as a team that might actually be able to get into the top-10 teams that play,” she says. “Hotstar wants to get behind the cause of increasing the popularity of cricket in the U.S., so it’s special to us that they’ve been doing well this year, and we hope to see that continue to grow.”