The now-suspended IPL 2021 had fans witnessing nail-biting matches one game after another during those three weeks. Apart from being suspended at halfway stage, IPL 2021 is also memorable season due to viewership numbers.
The 27th match of the season, between defending champions Mumbai Indians and MS Dhoni’s yellow army – Chennai Super Kings has become the most-watched IPL mid-season match ever as per the viewership details released by the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC). IPL’s in-house El Clasico, has 11.2 billion minutes of consumption. This match also became the most-watched match of IPL 2021.
Mumbai Indians had pulled off a nail-biting win as they beat table-toppers CSK by four wickets at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in New Delhi. The star of the show was Kieron Pollard as he smashed all CSK bowlers to chase down the target of 219 in the last ball of the game. Coming in at number five, then the team score was 81/3 in 9.4 overs, the West Indian went berserk to score 87 runs in 34 balls to win the game for his team.
The broadcaster also noted that IPL 2021 surpassed the overall reach to 367 million as compared to 357 million in 2020. The IPL mega cast with nine different feeds in multiple languages along with broadcast innovations such as simulated crowd sound and dynamic audio kept viewers equally engaged as the last season. The Star India network had earlier announced that it had clocked 323 million total impressions for the opening match of IPL 2021.
A source from Disney-Star told TOI on Friday, that “the growth in numbers is a testament to the faithful fan following that IPL enjoys and the continuous effort by Star and Disney to innovate and grow the league each year.”
The opening match between five-time champions Mumbai Indians and Royal Challengers Bangalore also received a tremendous response, bigger than the opening matches of all other IPL editions held previously besides last year and 42% higher than the edition in 2019. This year, nearly every third TV-owning household in India watched the opening match live.