EVER witnessed an Indian Premier League match in the flesh? One of the first things you notice is the sea of people slowly moving through rickety turnstiles, the cops trying to direct traffic amid rush hour and the vendors selling cheap jerseys outside stadia. The associated noise and chaos can be enough to make the head spin. In the ongoing edition, the above setting has played itself out in all 13 venues. It offers a perfect contrast to two high-rise buildings— One Unity Centre and Urmi Estate—in Lower Parel in Mumbai. To the outside world, they are just that. Random high-rise buildings. But you can safely call them the league’s 14th and 15th venues.
It’s easy to understand why. Without these two facilities in a rapidly developing part of the city, the league would only be accessible to the hundreds of thousands of ticket-holders every year. Thanks to them, the broadcast can be beamed to hundreds of millions of households across the globe. Inside the One Unity Centre (OUC) facility, the light is managed, rooms are temperature-controlled, sound is supervised and your face will be captured across multiple checkpoints before gaining entry. Nicholas Pooran may have made his bat do a lot of the talking in the initial stages of the competition. Mumbai Indians may have sprinkled some stardust to climb up the table in a frenzied three-week push from the middle of April to the beginning of May. But the magic, at least according to the people tasked with the responsibility of beaming live coverage to homes around the globe, isn’t in stadia up and down the country.
That magic, for some of the JioStar (the host broadcaster) employees directly or indirectly involved in the production of games, happens on the 28th floor of the OUC. So much so that the 28th floor in the facility has an unofficial moniker: “This is where the magic happens.”
Why do they refer to the floor as the one with all the sorcery. To put it at a very rudimentary level, the IPL appears on our TV screens thanks to a marriage of mind-boggling fibre connectivity, extremely high-end technology, fail-safe protocols that wouldn’t be out of place in a military establishment and the work of over 1,100 camera crew, producers, talent (the company’s in-house name for commentators or pundits) and graphic designers. This is a story of how a 1,100-strong contingent acts as one extended family for two-and-a-half months to connect the IPL to the TV audience.
Summers in India tend to be brutal. In the coastal areas, the humidity sends the ‘feels like’ temperature well into the 40s. In landlocked states in the hinterland, heat waves are as common as mangoes, one of the country’s biggest cultural exports.
While the mango continues to be the market leader in what makes the Indian summer somewhat tolerable, the IPL occupies second position. Just like the mango, the league is Indian in make but has its tentacles across the world. The owners of several IPL teams have franchises in at least three countries—South Africa, the US and UK. This association between the mango and the IPL doesn’t end there. Mumbai Indians’ parent company is also one of the largest exporters of mangoes anywhere on the planet.
Just like how mango farmers plan a year in advance, the broadcaster also does the same thing. For example, there are already discussions in place to ensure the 2026 edition of the league keeps grabbing eyeballs, from Dhanushkodi to Dharamsala.
Siddharth Sharma, Head of Content, Sports, JioStar, is the man responsible for creating an immersive audience-first experience for the broadcaster’s flagship sporting product. “There are many insights that form the foundation for us to really build for the next season,” says Sharma. “Because of the time we take, the gestation time for these plans to incubate and then materialise, we are able to chip at the block and make every pixel count to form the picture that eventually is presented to the fans,” he adds.
This sort of immersive experience is needed because Sharma and his team deal with many types of fans. There are people who log on to the league every day of the week and twice on Sunday. He calls them ‘the loyalists’. To ensure people like them keep coming back, he crafts a cricket-first experience. “Those are the fans you treat with utmost respect because you have to serve them the dish in the way that they are accustomed to.
In the ongoing edition, for example, there was a tweak specifically aimed towards the ‘loyalists’. “During the rivalry week, we had the best voices you could think of,” Sharma says. “When the coverage was on, there was a window which showed commentators like Shane Watson, Eoin Morgan and Robin Uthappa creating a sort of watch-along experience.”
The idea behind this was simple. Normally, you can only hear their voices, but sometimes you may want to feel the emotion in their voices. “When you put them on screen (next to the game), that emotion is visible,” Sharma says. “That kind of endeared itself to a lot of core fans as they loved the experience. These kind of experiences become personable when the match is going on.”
If that’s catering to people who have shelled out expensive fees to buy STBs or OTTs, they also have to curate for ‘fans who watch only the big events’. These fans, Sharma says, are people who are there for the opening game, the knockouts and marquee clashes like Chennai facing Mumbai. “If I have to serve these audiences and give them a taste because they are more entertainment-heavy and cricket-light, it’s important for us to imbue that sentiment into our coverage.”
That’s why they have had stand-up comics calling games or getting on board Bollywood stars as they bring their own uniqueness to proceedings. “They talk about their fandom and their love for the game, which speaks to these audiences because they are probably transactional. They are not as deeply rooted as the loyalists. All of these learnings go into building the product.”
To keep in mind a lot of these factors, there are roughly 25 feeds (a ballpark figure) on a match-by-match basis (some of these feeds are active on weekends) across TV and digital.
Advertising all these feeds is one thing; ensuring that they deliver on this is a different thing. This is where the fail-safe nature of the operation comes in. They have a tie-up with two different service providers who deliver fibre connectivity from stadia to both facilities in Mumbai.
One can understand why they have these protocols in place. Considering the worth of the product and the eyeballs it attracts, every second translates to ‘x’ amount of money. Every second unaccounted for can directly or indirectly affect the bottom line.
In the world of video production, there exists a term called run order. It exists for producers, assistant producers, floor managers, camerapersons and anchors to have an understanding of the flow of events. Every second of the run order has to be accounted for and tabulated for. Without it, the producer of the show is—without exaggerating its importance—blind.
The ideation and creation of this run order, depending on the producer’s way of working, begins the night before the match in question or the morning of the game. A few of the producers like to begin their work a few hours before they go to bed, But there isn’t any hard and fast rule. It honestly depends from person to person. They look at clips, delegate work, assign video capsules to be prepared and have the nuts and bolts ready to go in the mornings before the game. That, though, is just the beginning of the process of making a run order. For an IPL match beginning at 7.30 pm, a typical run order is from 6.30 pm (right from the time the countdown in the studios starts) till the time the umpire signals for play to start.
An archetypal run order contains basic video capsules—most of these capsules are about two minutes long—about the match they are previewing, the historical relevance of that match, numbers highlighting a player’s form and so on. Apart from these packages, the presenters and the experts talk about a number of issues about the match or the season itself.
These experts also begin their work hours before 6.30 pm. The presenters also go through stats and numbers, either prepared by them or given to them by the research team.
Like presenters, the talents also have extensive preparation before the games. For instance, here’s Manvinder Bisla, tasked with talking cricket in Haryanvi. “I begin preparation for games from the night before,” he laughs. “I typically see what a batting team’s numbers are in the powerplay, their numbers after that phase and so on. For example, let’s take Kolkata. They have good spinners, but when they bat, they struggle against spin, so I get their numbers against spin. You have to prepare all of this when you are calling a game.”
These numbers are generally found in the run order as well.
The IPL’s host broadcaster has to put out at least 12 of these run orders (each run order can run to three or four pages long, with all of them planned to surgical precision; there are gaps accounting for advertising) on a daily basis to cater to all 12 language feeds. That means 12 producers working 24 hours ahead of the clock to keep the viewers not only engaged but forcing them to come back every night for two months.
Sometimes, the run order will have to be burned because of ‘stop press’ developments. Something similar happened just before the Kolkata Knight Riders’ encounter against Chennai Super Kings on May 7. Rohit Sharma announced his Test retirement on social media, forcing a lot of people on the 28th floor of the OUC to cut and paste a package on the fly to pay tribute to one of India’s greatest white-ball captains.
The graphics team (imagine an office space the size of an indoor five-a-side football field) buzzed into action. The producers of the different language feeds zoomed into view. Dinner in the office canteen had become takeaway. That call from their daughter had to be quietly cut. For they were working on a war-footing as they aimed to piece together the story of a 12-year Test career as a five-minute package while still ensuring the Kolkata vs Chennai match remained a talking point.
The vast majority of the people the broadcaster employs to bring the IPL to TV screens are nameless and faceless. That cameraperson who has to catch the local in the afternoon. The graphics designer who will have to stay beyond midnight because of a rain-affected game. The producer who is forced to cut their birthday cake next to an editing tool in the workspace an hour before a playoff.
In fact, the only public faces of the broadcaster are the experts. In the 2025 edition, there are around 170 of them, who are either crisscrossing the country or staying put in studios (each language has its own separate workspace).
Considering they play a crucial role in the stories Sharma & Co. want to create, it’s no surprise that there’s an elaborate hiring process in place. And, no. Contrary to popular social media belief, just because a cricketer has played for the national team, they aren’t randomly given an appointment letter.
All of them are vetted, individual feedback is given and a glossary is prepared to help them use (or avoid) certain phrases.
“My approach has always been... get together people who have been part of dressing rooms and players who have been part of IPLs over the years. Because they provide the most wanted view of the league, the players, the dressing room, the cultures... everything. Essentially, I’m a storyteller, and as a storyteller, if I can bring these stories, these personable anecdotes, the richer the conversations become,” says Sharma.
Not just people who have played IPLs, but anybody who has had a previous cricketing association. Zonal selectors, local coaches... they are all welcome. It’s kind of why Sharma likes to call them the ‘insiders’ as they have an inside view of the game. “All of this contributes to a layered, more textual storytelling.” Apart from this, the experts are actively encouraged to bring in pop culture references, add a touch of local flavour and air generous dollops of their own lexicon.
It’s working.
Bisla, who has a healthy Haryanvi fan following, is now IDed for his commentary. “When you go on social media and see the affection for Haryanvi commentary, it really boosts your confidence,” he says. “There was an incident. I had taken four to five days off to be with family and we were on a trip. I do get recognised as the cricketer Bisla. But somebody walked out to me and asked if ‘I was the commentator Bisla’. That felt special, when you get a new identity based on what you are doing right now.”
If Bisla is a rookie trying to forge a new path, Aakash Chopra is an industry veteran, a man who has been associated with commentary, either in print or on air, for well over a decade. With Bisla being a fresh voice in a language that doesn’t lend itself naturally to live sports broadcast, an in-built novelty factor has likely helped the former IPL champion build a fanbase.
Chopra, though, doesn’t have that cushion. So does it bring its own challenges? “One thing you never have to change is your opinion,” the former India opener says. “If you are opinionated and following the game sincerely and diligently, the need to reinvent is not dire. People will come, bring their flavour and stories. I may not have a lot of stories, so that is not my strength and I may not go down that road. But I can always go narrating the stories of people that I may have found or read about, like where has this kid come from? That is something that I would still do. That preparation is very separate from preparing for a game.”
The studios at OUC are all temperature controlled. In fact, there are big stickers outside the big doors informing all guests about this. That most people preferred to have their jackets on them in May in Mumbai told its own story.
On the many small and big screens inside these studios, producers had access to over 15-plus cameras all at once. A few cameras were trained on the warm-ups of both Kolkata and Chennai and some of them focused on the crowd. One of them followed MS Dhoni, a few of them beamed random shots. When all this was going on, folks at home were either treated to video capsules, talking heads or advertisements (the order of the advertisements itself was pre-decided before the match). A run order was quietly being executed from the top of page one to the bottom of page three.
To the watching world, it may seem random. But inside, it’s one box after another being ticked, a plan coming to fruition with not a lot of margin for error. Here’s an example: inside a few studios, there are a couple of random ‘X’s on the floor.
The ‘X’ is to inform where people ought to stand when they are on air.
An hour or so after Kolkata’s win over Chennai, the lights were turned off, and people started going home.
A good four to five hours after the match, producers finally turned their laptops off and went to sleep.
A draft run order had been completed. A new day. A new match.
3, 2, 1... and it’s go time.