The 15th season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) which is in its final stages saw a thrilling eliminator match between Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) and Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), recording strong viewership on over the top (OTT) platform Disney+Hotstar.
While RCB faced an immediate loss when bowler Mohsin Khan took the wicket of skipper Faf du Plessis who opened with Virat Kohli, the team returned to form when Rajat Patidar played one of his best innings. Patidar who scored his maiden T20 century not only helped RCB make a big total of 207 but his performance also grabbed more eyeballs on the OTT.
Disney+Hotstar, the official streaming partner of IPL, reached a new peak of 8.7 million concurrent viewers during RCB's innings. In the first half of the match between RCB and LSG, viewership touched 8.2 million mark during the 18th over which later increased to 8.3 million by the 20th over.
The last match that saw peak viewership of 8.3 million during IPL 15 was when Chennai Super Kings played against Mumbai Indians on April 21. MS Dhoni's innings that had helped CSK win the second game of the season took the viewership a notch up on the streaming platform.
In the RCB versus LSG match, Patidar's batting that led to the fixture becoming one of the most viewed games during IPL's season 15. Viewership in the last overs increased rapidly from 8.3 to 8.5 million and settled at 8.7 million, the highest viewership so far during IPL 2022.
During IPL 13, the registered peak viewership was recorded at 8.7 million concurrent viewers.
While the viewership during the second half of the match remained strong, it did not increase to more than 8.3 million. But the RCB versus LSG match has surpassed the viewership of the season 14 finale when MS Dhoni-led CSK had won the IPL and viewership had reached 6.6 million on Disney+ Hotstar.
The highest viewership record that IPL has so far on the digital platform is during the 12th edition when the match between RCB and MI had registered concurrency of 12.7 million viewers, which was later broken by the final when the platform saw 18 million viewers tuning in to watch the league.
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