Even as the media businesses of Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) delivered strong revenue from operations, Viacom18 revenue was driven primarily by studios and sports verticals, the company said.

RIL, which yesterday came out with its Q2 financial results, said the revenue from operations of the combined media business — comprising news, entertainment and OTT service — clocked Rs.1,865 crore, up by 20.4 percent Y-o-Y.

RIL said that the rise of Viacom18, a joint venture between Reliance, US’ Paramount and Bodhi Tree, was largely due to entertainment programming and sports.

Investments in sports programming, especially cricket, is driving a sharp jump in audience traffic on JioCinema as live sports consumption increasingly pivots towards digital, the company said.

Viacom18 is building a strong catalogue of entertainment content, which will leverage this wide reach to make JioCinema the default destination for consumers across the country looking for quality content.

Reliance added that Viacom18 continued to strengthen its sports portfolio with acquisition of exclusive media rights for BCCI international and domestic cricket matches for five years and Indian Super League (football) for two years.

Along with IPL, WPL, Cricket South Africa, SA20, MLC, among others, Viacom18 has firmly established itself as the home of cricket in India, RIL elaborated, adding the portfolio of other sports include Olympics 2024, NBA, La Liga, Ligue1, Serie A, Diamond League, MotoGP, Ultimate Table Tennis, and top BWF events.

The first cricket BCCI series, India vs Australia, reached 90 million users on JioCinema that continued its journey of entertaining audiences with premium content like ‘Bigg Boss’, ‘Taali’, ‘Kaalkoot’, and ‘Khatron Ke Khiladi’, amongst others. ‘Bigg Boss OTT’ became the most streamed entertainment property in India watched by over 100 million viewers and generating 30 billion minutes of watch-time.

The energy-to-telecom-to-entertainment company said that the TV entertainment network had a 10.5 percent viewership share in the non-news genre. Colors channel  was the #2 channel in prime time with ‘Khatron Ke Khiladi’ being the highest rated reality show in the genre during the quarter. Colors Kannada and Colors Marathi maintained strong positions in their respective markets and the movie channel portfolio has strengthened its viewership share and ranking.

JioCinema ad revenue also grew on the back of original digital content, the company stated.