Star Sports, hotstar plan star-studded coverage of Rio 2016 Olympic Games

The campaign 'Isse bada kuch nahi' is just a curtain raiser to the scale of the coverage that Star Sports intends to unleash on the Indian audience

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Mumbai | June 17, 2016

Star Sports is all geared up to bring the 2016 Rio Olympics, which will begin on August 5 in Brazil, home to the Indian audience. This year, the Games will see the largest ever Olympic contingent from India.

Their campaign 'Isse bada kuch nahi' is a prelude to the scale of the coverage and an ode to the biggest sporting event in the world.

Nitin Kukreja

With eight dedicated channels broadcasting 24x7 in two languages-- English and Hindi-- Star is leaving no stone unturned. Speaking about how Star is going to make the experience completely special for the audience, Nitin Kukreja, CEO, Star Sports, said, “It is going to be an unprecedented level of coverage between television and digital. Never before has Star Sports dedicated eight channels on a 24x7 basis to cover any sporting event. It will be done in two languages, Hindi and English, for the first time ever.”

Speaking from the television perspective, Kukreja said there will be focus on the marquee events like the 100 meters dash along with sports such as badminton, hockey, shooting, archery where Indian athletes have proved their mettle in the past.

There will be a lot of surround programming to look forward to with crews stationed in Rio meeting the players, talking to the players and capturing the moments of their preparation and joy.

Introducing the panel of experts and the anchors for this year's Olympics, Kukreja said, “We have got a very elite panel of experts and anchors who will be the face of Star Sports during the Olympics. There is the legendary Ian Thorpe, Prakash Padukone, Anjali Bhagwat, Viren Rasquinha and Rehan Poncha.”

“It will be grand, it will be special, it is a major milestone in the history of Star Sports and I think a major milestone in the journey of Indian sports which we are very proud and privileged to be a part of,” he said.

Apart from the extensive coverage on television, Star's video streaming platform Hotstar will also cover the Olympics. With 14 live feeds available round-the-clock, it can go up to 36 feeds on the Olympics video player, available to users on demand throughout the event.

Ajit Mohan

“The big opportunity that we are seeing with Olympics is to dramatically increase the scale and width of our sports offering by bringing the entire Olympics onto a single destination,” said Ajit Mohan, CEO, Hotstar.

Hotstar will supplement Star Sport's coverage by making sure that they cover every single second of the Olympics. In a country where mobile phones are fast becoming the primary screen for a huge section of population, especially in urban India, Hotstar's endeavour will be to see that sports fans do not miss even a single second of the world's biggest sporting event.

Promising an extremely immersive and interactive experience on Hotstar, Mohan said, “We are rolling out a new Olympics video player where sports fans will have access to not just all the live video feeds, but will also have access to a lot of data and stats around all of the events happening in real time.”

Personalisation is going to be a big part of the whole viewing experience that Hotstar has envisioned for the sport fans in the country. It will now be possible for the audience to decide the country and even the sport they want to follow and the experience on the web is going to be customised based on those selections.

With all these new features, this year if you need to know about the medals tally for the Olympics all you will have to do is log on to Hotstar.

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