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.
With 230 million viewers turning in for the live broadcast and 53 billion minutes of watch time across TV and digital platforms, the final also became the second-highest rated ODI in TV history (apart from ICC Cricket World Cup events).
“The Champions Trophy made an incredible comeback after eight years, and the Indian audience has been tremendous, especially for the final between India and New Zealand,” said Jay Shah, chair of the ICC.
The astounding viewership figures demonstrate how popular cricket is in India and how broadcasting ICC games in multiple languages can greatly increase fan interaction. The Champions Trophy marketing strategy is clearly successful, generating enthusiasm among both new and old fan bases while enhancing the event’s thrilling cricket action.
“This achievement is a result of the combined strength of the largest, most extensively used multi-platform sports destination, the fan-focused storytelling approach of the JioStar’mega-casts,’ and our superior technological capabilities,” said Sanjog Gupta, CEO of Sports at Jio Star.
In order to recruit at scale, varied audience segments with varying persuasions across devices, a unique cohort-based marketing campaign created a variety of apertures for the tournament, which drove interest in it. The supporters’ enthusiasm was heightened by India’s undefeated, championship-winning performance, which also contributed to the Final’s surge in viewership.
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.
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