'Jio Cinema and Voot might not merge anytime soon'

Amidst rumors that Viacom18 is likely to merge its flagship OTT platform Voot with JioCinema to live-stream the Indian Premier League 2023, a company spokesperson said that the two platforms are expected to continue as separate entities for now. "Voot continues to exist as a separate app. There’s no plan to migrate or merge at the moment," he said.

Voot currently runs as a separate entity that provides Viacom18’s television properties and shows on OTT while JioCinema acts more like an aggregator of content across all broadcasters apart from sports streaming. While the latter is free-to-use, Voot has some content behind the paywall that falls under Voot Select.

Anil Jayaraj, CEO (Sports), Viacom18 Media, in a recent media roundtable, said that no such announcement has been made about the merger of the two platforms. "We will be building Jio Cinema on the back of what we have in terms of existing content as well as new acquisitions,” he added.

In September last year the Competition Commission of India (CCI) approved the merger of Viacom 18 Media Private Limited (Viacom18) and Jio Cinema OTT platform which was owned by Reliance Projects and Property Management Services Limited (RPPMSL)—a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited.

Viacom18—which recently acquired the digital rights for IPL 2023-27 for Rs 20,500 crore—says that it will be streamed free of cost for one year. “We’re trying to build a sports business which delights the Indian consumer and provides the largest aggregation of viewers. We’re actually trying to access anybody who has an internet-enabled device. This year, we want to do it without any cost or any charge so that we can get the maximum number of users and advertisers can have the choice of audience they want to target,” Jayaraj said.

Ahead of the 16th season of the Indian Premier League (IPL), Viacom18 said that this year digital advertising will be bigger than TV. “The honest truth is that digital is already bigger than TV. There are 700 million devices in the country. If you look at TV ratings in the country in last few years, it is going down. We want to cut across access, affordability and languages,” he added.

Viacom18 will have 16 feeds and multicam options for consumers to choose from. “Advertisers love digital for the scale it provides. This year for IPL digital will be bigger than TV. You can actually choose which particular audience to target. That level of targeting is not possible in TV. The second thing is that after delivering that they can also measure it. This is the year when digital advertising will be bigger than TV for IPL,” he said.

He added that he’s seeing advertiser interest from industries like FMCG, auto, beverages, etc. “When we went for FIFA, we had both TV and digital and our experience was significantly shaped by the response on digital. The demand in digital was much bigger than TV,” he said.

With FIFA, cricket, badminton rights, tennis, handball, and most likely the Olympics and hockey, Viacom18 wants to position itself as a player beyond just cricket that will help build each of these businesses as a separate entity.

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