Star TV Network, Indian media conglomerate and a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company India, is entering the ‘best in fan engagement’ category for their ‘Star Sports Cheer@Home initiative’ a world-first interactive dynamic audio product that enabled IPL cricket fans to cheer from their homes during lockdown via our OTT platform Disney+ Hotstar.
Since the advent of Covid, we’ve seen broadcasters experiment with artificial sound to fill the void of absent crowds. At Star, we saw things differently. While select fans in stadiums had lost their voices, millions at home never had one. This was an opportunity to democratize broadcast audio & bring back real reactions to sound design, swapping ‘fake’ for ‘interactive & authentic’.
Users responded to action via emojis within the social feed of our streaming platform Disney+ Hotstar. Data triggered real-time custom-created audio in the broadcast feed. Audiences could cheer from their homes, and actually hear that player’s name being chanted back on OTT/television.
We wanted to ensure that a sport that is largely a community-driven experience feels like a community experience on-air with these initiatives which have on any given day millions of fans participating in them. That’s the sentiment of togetherness we want to drive in our broadcast.
The product has huge potential as a long term solution beyond covid to add a new layer of interactivity to broadcast audio & visuals and enable editorial storytelling on the mood of the world’s fans, their rivalries, favourite players and moments.
Users reacted at an unprecedented scale – 13m users clicked > 720m emojis in the first 4 matches! 4.8 Billion Emojis were sent in 59 matches!
With this tsunami of reactions, we are set to move into a new era for scale, interactivity & a blurring of the lines between digital & linear TV.
