Star India is ready to live stream the 87th Academy Awards starting at 5am India time on Monday through its latest mobile application.
It’s the closest you’ll come to clutching an Oscar, in a manner of speaking, as you hold your mobile phone to watch the Hollywood awards ceremony live.
Broadcaster Star India Pvt. Ltd is ready to live stream the the 87th Academy Awards presentation starting at 5am India time on Monday through its latest mobile application, hotstar, for the first time.
“We will be promoting the Oscars extensively on television and on digital. Apart from showing the Oscars live on hotstar, the Academy Awards will also be available on the Star app for the next two weeks,” said a spokesperson for Star India. “We will be promoting that as well. We are chasing aggressive targets for Oscars on hotstar.”
Star has the digital media rights for the Oscars for three years starting 2015.
An estimated Rs.1.5 crore is riding on the digital broadcast of the Oscars, according to media buyers’ estimates, with marquee brands such Coca-Cola Zero, Jaguar and Levi’s Strauss and Co. confirmed as sponsors. Two sponsorship slots are still up for grabs.
Hotstar was launched on 1 February and has got 5 million downloads so far, as per company data. It offers more than 35,000 hours of content in seven languages, promising viewers a big library of movies, television shows and even live sports (cricket, football, tennis and kabaddi).
Viewers can download hotstar app, available across platforms including Android and iOS, or access the content from the hotstar website free of cost.
The India-Pakistan cricket match in World Cup 2015 garnered close to 25 million views on hotstar and starsports.com in India—one of the highest for a digital platform for a single game in a sporting event, as per data from Star India, the official broadcaster of the event.
Debabrata Mukherjee, vice-president, marketing and commercial, Coca-Cola India and Southwest Asia, said: “We are also looking to leverage this partnership (with hotstar app) through our own social and digital media assets. This weaves in neatly with our philosophy of being media agnostic for targeted messaging.”
The frequency of ads aired on the digital platform would be similar to that on the telecast, said Praseed Prasad, national director (digital trading) at GroupM, a WPP agency handling the mandate of media buying for the hotstar app.
With the increasing penetration of smartphones, the number of mobile Internet users in India is expected to reach 213 million by June 2015—a 23% jump over six months, according to the Mobile Internet in India 2014 report released last month.
India had 173 million mobile Internet users in December last year.
According to the report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (Iamai) and IMRB International, a market research firm, the number of mobile Internet users in rural India is set to grow at a rate of 33% from October 2014 to reach 49 million by March 2015 and 53 million by June 2015.
According to media buyers, the live telecast of the award ceremony to be hosted by actor Neil Patrick Harris, might not get as much traction as the repeat telecasts due to the timing of the ceremony.
“A large part of the consumption will happen outside of live telecast window. Even on television, the repeat telecasts do well for them,” Prasad of GroupM said.
Mallikarjun Das, chief executive officer of Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), agreed. “The audience will be really small. It’s possible that only a hardcore movie buff will watch it live at 5 in the morning.”
Last year, the live telecast of the Academy Awards itself garnered a viewership of 900,000 on Star Movies in India, the highest recorded in the last five years, said the company.
In 2013, the Oscars was watched by 1.1 million viewers (including live and repeat telecasts) in India.Source: Livemint.com
