JioCinema's IPL telecast may give a boost to telcos' ARPU

The free telecast of the Indian Premier League (IPL) on JioCinema boosted average monthly data use by about 5%, industry executives said.

This may result in a marginal increase - at most a 1-2% rise in the fiscal first quarter - in average revenue per user (ARPU) for the telcos as consumption would be within the daily allowance that most packs offer currently, analysts said. "This consumption spike would result in marginal ARPU improvement since higher consumption may not necessarily translate to equally higher data top-ups," Prashant Singhal, EY Global, TMT emerging markets leader, said.

Most prepaid packs available today come with 1.5-2 GB daily allowance, sufficient to stream a cricket match on mobile for the most part, analysts said. The average time spent on JioCinema per viewer per match for this year's IPL was one hour. "An increase in content watching owing to the sports event is likely to have pushed up the data consumption per subscriber in the near term; however, the same is not expected to be ARPU accretive," Ankit Jain, vice-president and sector head, corporate ratings, ICRA.

Consumption of IPL is still heavy on TV, meaning viewers use the handset to consume the matches in bits - like when they are travelling. Such consumption would not result in meaningful data usage spikes, said analysts.