MUMBAI: Sports Flashes, the Indian online sports radio channel, has launched fantasy game Sporty Jackpot, which will allow users to play fantasy cricket, football and other sports for as low as Re 1.

The company will offer a prize amount of upto Rs 2 crore in some of the matches.

A late mover in the fantasy sports space, Sporty Jackpot has decided to go vernacular. The service will start with Hindi and will also be available in Bangla and Punjabi in future.

The company is also using an offline network of close to 100 distributors across North India to market the service and sell recharges, similar to telecom companies selling prepaid coupons.

“We are launching the product with the Indian Premier League in Delhi, Punjab, UP East, Uttaranchal and Harayana,” said Raman Raheja, founder, Sports Flashes. “We have a retail network with 100s of distributors. They will install the product on consumers’ smartphones, recharge it and also show them how to play.”

The idea of a fantasy sports platform came to Raheja after his sports radio company started receiving requests from the existing players for content syndication.

“Since last one and a half years, we have been receiving calls from fantasy sports companies to offer our audio sports content to them. We realised that they want our content to engage their users during the match. After studying the market, we decided to launch our own fantasy sports product,” he said. “Others have created fantasy sports platforms and are now adding content, we have built it the other way.”

Sports Flashes is a multi sport, multi language sports content platform catering to sports fans through audio and video programming. Radio Sports Flashes was launched in January 2018 as a 24×7 Internet radio channel. It offers live chat commentaries, talk shows, special sports programs, experts comments, sports news & updates, audio documentaries, university sports and sportainment content.

“Sports Flashes is the leader in online sports radio space with the best content available for sports enthusiasts. Similarly, we want to give a world class experience and excitement to our users and customers with our fantasy and prediction game,” Raheja added.

He said that with 50 millions sports fans already following the sports channel of the company, he aims to convert at least 1 million users in the first year itself.

“Our fantasy game launch has been delayed due to Covid, but we expect to catch up the lost time in the coming months with the IPL,” he said.

The company has also added prizes which can be won by redeeming the points/ coins earned by playing prediction games during live matches.

India has close to 100 million fantasy sports users and the space has seen FDI of Rs 1500 crore in the last few years. From a handful companies in 2016, the space now has over 200 platforms.