Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Jio vie for IPL rights
NEWDELHI: As the curtains go up on Indian Premier League (IPL) television and digital rights auction in Mumbai on Monday, Internet giants and leading broadcasters will be among 24 aspirants gunning for a piece of cricketing action.
Among the leading bidders are social media and Internet giants Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Yahoo!, new telco Reliance Jio, and a bunch of broadcasters including Sony, Discovery and Star. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is awarding TV and internet and mobile rights of IPL for a five-year period.
On Saturday, BCCI CEO Rahul Johri told PTI that he expects revenue from the auction to be “historic.”
The bid sizes and the winners will offer new glimpses of IPL — the world’s most valuable cricket property — and highlight the emerging media landscape in India and changing viewership habits.
“We have come a long way from 20 years ago when ESPN and Star Sports had formed a joint venture to bid for sports rights and keep the pricing of media rights under control. IPL is obviously the most valuable sporting property in the country. So, be it an ad-supported model or subscriptionled or a data-guzzler, either way you need consumers and IPL is the holy grail of delivering large consumer audiences,” said Sameer Nair, a media veteran who recently joined Aditya Birla Group’s production firm Applause Entertainment as CEO.
This assortment of bidders are all after one thing — content. “Whether it is traditional broadcasters or the new streaming platforms, everyone is going after content. If you look at non-fiction content across sports and entertainment, nothing is bigger than IPL. From a digital point of view, 4G has made connectivity a reality. In the coming future, even the price of TV versus digital media rights will close the gap. While sports is appointment viewing, live sports is hugely being seen as consumption on the go,” said Indranil Das Blah, founding partner, Kwan Entertainment and Marketing Solutions, a sports marketing firm.
The brand value of IPL is over $5.3 billion, according to a recent report by Duff &
Phelps, a New York-based corporate finance advisory firm.
In 2009, IPL’s TV rights were given to Sony Pictures Network (then Multi Screen Media) and the World Sports Group at ₹8,200 crore for a nine-year deal, while Star India’s digital streaming platform Hotstar won the internet and mobile rights for ₹302.2 crore for a three-year period from 2015 to 2017. The new TV rights for IPL are likely to be sold for $1.8 billion, and the internet and mobile broadcasting rights for $210 million, as per the report cited above.
IPL 10 generated 1.25 billion impressions on television across the five Sony television channels (an increase of 22.5% over the previous year)