Dream11 pivots to a second screen sports platform

Bengaluru: India’s fantasy sports giant, Dream11, is reinventing itself as a second-screen platform for live sports. It is pitching a new watch-along app that sits alongside broadcasters such as JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar, rather than streaming matches itself.

India’s Online Gaming Bill, passed in August, effectively outlawed Dream11’s core business overnight by imposing a blanket ban on real-money online games, including fantasy sports, poker, and rummy, and barring banks and UPI from processing any such transactions. The legislation explicitly overrode earlier court rulings that treated fantasy as a skill game and carries jail terms and crore-level fines for companies, promoters, and even endorsers who continue to offer money-based contests.

Harsh Jain, co-founder and chief executive of parent Dream Sports, told reporters that the new Dream11 is designed as a “second screen dominator experience” that becomes “the best friend” of first-screen broadcasters, much as fantasy sports once boosted viewership. Instead of paid contests, the app hosts live watch-along rooms where creators provide partisan commentary and banter while users track integrated scoreboards, chat, buy virtual shout-outs, or pay to join influencers on stage. “We are moving away from the whole gaming piece altogether,” Jain said, stressing that even where Dream Sports owns rights through its streaming service FanCode, “we will not show their streams” on the new app because it is “meant to be a second-screen sports entertainment platform.”

He argued that fantasy sports had a “very positive effect” on viewership and that second-screen engagement can lift sports consumption sharply compared with passive TV watching. The company is launching with around 25 curated creators but plans to open the platform over time, betting that Dream11’s 20-30 million monthly free-to-play users will give influencers instant audiences that rival or exceed watch-along streams on YouTube and Twitch. “No creator wants to come and go live with like 10 people watching,” Jain said. “We have a chance that when we go live for the first match, any creator can come and see a hundred thousand people, maybe a million people have watched them.” Jain cast the product as a fix for what he called the “broken experience” of watching matches alone in a world of nuclear families and scattered friend groups. Fans, he said, want to “watch a match alone at home” but “never want to watch it actually alone,” and are now using WhatsApp, X, and Instagram as crude workarounds.

The new Dream11 aims to capture that energy in one place, letting users “watch a match alone together” with the funny or outspoken voices they wish official commentators could be.