The Indian cricket board had doubled the floor price for the auction to 329 billion rupees for rights covering 2023 through 2027. The 163.47 billion rupees paid by current rights holder Disney Star five years ago was about double the 82 billion rupees paid by Japan’s Sony between 2008 and 2017.
The bidding has been split into four parts: TV broadcast rights for India; digital rights for India; rights for select matches, including the tournament opener and some knockout games; and TV and digital broadcast rights outside India.
Sunday’s bidding was restricted to TV and digital rights for India. The bidding for select matches and global markets will begin after the bids for India’s rights are closed.
Sources told Nikkei that Sunday’s bids were driven by Reliance Industries’ subsidiary Viacom18, Walt Disney Company’s Disney Star and Sony Pictures Networks India, while India’s pay-TV channel Zee bid for digital rights only.
London-based investment bank Elara Capital anticipates that cumulative bids for IPL broadcast rights could top 500 billion to 600 billion rupees for the 2023-2027 period. This translates into 1.35 billion rupees per match — topping the rates for the English Premier League, Germany’s soccer association Bundesliga, as well Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League in the US.
At US$6.3 billion, Elara Capital values IPL higher than the Premier League at US$5.3 billion and the NHL at US$4.43 billion.
Broadcast rights for India’s most-watched sport are the easiest way to cement a foothold among Indian viewers.
IPL broadcast rights are crucial to the goals of Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, who also owns the Mumbai Indians cricket team. A play in IPL could not only boost subscriptions for his telecom venture, Jio, but also mark a turnaround for Viacom 18, which lags behind Disney Star and the combined entity of Zee and SPNI, who announced a merger in January.
Viacom 18 — a 51:49 joint venture between Reliance Industries’ TV18 and Paramount Global — recently shored up its war chest with a 135 billion rupees infusion from Bodhi Tree Systems, an investment company backed by businessman James Murdoch and Uday Shankar, the former head of Disney Star.
For Disney Star, retaining the broadcast rights is all about protecting its lead in streaming. With 51 million users — largely comprised of IPL viewers — its Hotstar on-demand platform was estimated to be the largest in India, according to research company Media Partners Asia, far eclipsing Amazon Prime at 22 million viewers and Netflix at 6.1 million.
According to Elara Capital, endorsements, sponsorship and media spending on Indian sporting events topped 95.3 billion rupees in 2021, compared with 91.9 billion rupees in 2019. Cricket accounted for 88% of the spending last year, compared with 80% in 2020.