With its TV ratings soaring to the highest ever for a multi-nation cricket competition, the ICC Men’s Champions Trophy 2025 has shattered significant audience records in India, surpassing the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 by an astounding 23%.
An incredible 137 billion minutes were spent watching the event live on Star Sports, and 110 billion minutes were spent on JioHotstar. The huge numbers came from a thrilling final between India and New Zealand in Dubai on March 9 that reached a record for digital cricket viewing with 122 million live watchers on TV and 61 million on JioHotstar.
ICC Chair, Jay Shah said:
“The Champions Trophy made an amazing return after eight years and the viewership numbers from India have been overwhelming, in particular the final between India and New Zealand.
Jay Shah
“The incredible viewership numbers highlight the mass appeal that cricket has in India and how taking ICC events to audiences in different languages can significantly boost fan engagement. The success of the Champions Trophy marketing strategy is evident, creating excitement in existing and new fanbases, complimented by highly exciting cricket throughout the event.”
Jay Shah
CEO Sports, Jio Star, Sanjog Gupta said:
“This accomplishment is a result of the combined strength of the widest, most deeply penetrated multi-platform destination for sports, the fan-focussed story-telling approach of the JioStar ‘mega-casts’ and our superior technological capabilities.”
Sanjog Gupta
“The interest in the tournament was fuelled by a one-of-a-kind cohort-based marketing effort which built diverse apertures for the tournament in order to recruit at scale, differentiated audience segments with distinct persuasions across devices. India’s unbeaten, title-winning campaign, further fuelled the passion of the fans and drove the spike in viewership for the Final.”
Sanjog Gupta
According to data given by the Broadcast Audience Research Council, the highly anticipated league match between bitter rivals India and Pakistan drew over 26 billion minutes of linear TV viewing, making it one of the most viewed ODI matches ever in India.
With 19.5 billion linear viewing minutes compared to 26.5 billion for the Champions Trophy match, the India-Pakistan encounter in the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 in Ahmedabad earned a television rating of 10.8% lower than the chartbuster.
Superstar Virat Kohli gave the eventual champions a spectacular six-wicket victory in the match, which was broadcast on linear TV to a record 206 million viewers in Dubai on February 23. India continued to dominate Pakistan in international ICC competitions.
JioStar, the rights holders, made sure that the action was broadcast live to homes nationwide in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada on Star Sports and Sports 18 channels, which is partly responsible for the impressive viewership figures.
The tournament was broadcast live on digital channels in a record 16 feeds in nine different languages: English, Hindi, Marathi, Haryanvi, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. There were also four multi-cam feeds, an Indian Sign Language feed, and the JioHotstar Max View feed.
Entertaining programming both before and during the tournament kept viewers and fans engrossed in the high-stakes competition.
