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Why does Indian sports need to go beyond language barriers?
Did you know 72% of the Indian rural population's most-preferred language of reading is Hindi?
Did you know 72% of the Indian rural population's most-preferred language of reading is Hindi?
With the popularity of Indian sports slowly on the rise, the need for producing more regional content is more now than ever. Surprising as it may sound, 37% of the urban population in India still prefers Hindi as their first-choice language with a much larger chunk of the rural population consuming content in their native languages.
Bridging the gap in Indian sports has been our sole motto since the inception of The Bridge, and we were thrilled when we could cater to the needs of our sports-loving audience beyond language barriers during the Commonwealth Games.
Despite the Hindi vertical being in its nascent stages, over 100K people interacted with our content during the games. This not only inspired us to produce more vernacular content but also think beyond conventional ways of bridging the gap and reach out to more households.
We experimented with detailed Weekly Bulletins, live streams of major sporting events in Hindi and sports updates on The Bridge's Hindi socials. It was also heartening to see the number of people asking us to expand our coverage in various regional languages.
India possesses the largest online sports audience in the Asia-Pacific region, with nearly 468 million unique visitors according to a report by Comscore and it almost seems unfair to speak about stories of athletes that could resonate with only a certain % of the Indian population.
In a country of more than 20 official languages, creating vernacular content is the need of the hour to expand viewership to the remotest of places and take inspiring sport stories to areas where they actually belong.
Here's when we travelled to a remote place in Manipur to speak to one of the greatest boxers India has produced. Watch here.
While we keep working towards bringing out stories beyond languages, religion and geography, here's a small reminder for all of us to appreciate our roots and encourage our country's rich diversity.
