Star breaks bank to grab IPL rights
MOTHER OF DEALS Star India acquires fiveyear TV and digital rights deal for ~ 16,347.5 crore
India on Monday hit all other bidders in the fray for a six with just one single mindboggling global bid of ~16,347.50 crore to acquire the broadcast and digital rights of the Indian Premier League (IPL) for the next five years.
The fact that BCCI earlier got ~ 8200 crore from Sony for a 10 year term (2008-2017) shows the quantum jump in value of IPL. With this deal, it is clear that IPL is the hottest property in Indian cricket. The BCCI will approximately fetch ~55 crore per IPL game whereas an international match brings in about ~43 crore.
In 2012, Star won broadcast and digital rights of India matches between 2012-2018 for ~3851 crore, a figure broken down to ~43 crore per match.
Going by the response for the IPL media rights, the BCCI would be licking their lips when the television rights for international matches go up for grab next year in March.
With IPL’s acquisition, Star India, who also own the India and ICC cricket rights, have become the ultimate destination for cricketing action in the country. Out of the 24 companies who bought the bid document, only 14 companies entered the bidding process with big names like Amazon, Twitter and Discovery staying away. Thirteen bids were found to be eligible after technical evaluation with BamTech disqualified.
The battle was clearly between Sony Pictures Network and Star India. As expected Sony went all out to retain the India subcontinent TV rights with a bid of ~11,050 crore, while Star placed only ~6,196 crore for the same category.
From the looks of it, Star India had prepared well to guard against all scenarios. It not just banked heavily on the Indian subcontinent TV and digital rights, but also placed bids for USA, Europe, Middle East, Africa and the rest of the world categories. Placing a global bid was the winning shot that clinched the deal for Star.
Had there been no global bid in place, Star would have had to stay satisfied with just one territory rights. Star India’s consolidated bid was just ~500 crore more than the consolidated individual bid.
As per the bidding rules, if the global bid received (~16,347.50 crore) is greater than the sum total parts of every individual bid (~15,819.51 crore), it stands to win the rights. On the other hand, Sony placed a bid in one territory other than the Indian subcontinent TV rights. Another factor that could have worked in Star’s favour was other players refraining from bidding in rest of the categories.
India, cricket and the IPL have changed dramatically since its inception (in 2008) and this bid is a reflection of that. If it (our figures) were slightly less, we would not have got the rights. We won by a really narrow margin of 23 per cent, so we were very close.
One expected the digital rights to give an insight on the rising trend and the numbers were not disappointing. Companies like Facebook, Airtel and Jio breached the 3000-crore mark with the social media giant placing ~3900 crore bid for the India digital rights. The whopping IPL media rights is another shot in the arm for the troubled BCCI after managing to get ~1079 crore for Team India sponsorship rights and ~2199 crore IPL title sponsorship rights.