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Sold! TV, digital rights in ₹44k-cr IPL windfall
On a day the rupee plunged to an all-time low and the stock market tanked, the Indian cricket board got a ringing endorsement from market forces for the Indian Premier League, its marquee property. While Disney Star won the IPL Indian sub-continent TV rights for a whopping ₹23,575 crore, Viacom18 bought the digital rights with a bid of ₹20,500 crore at the media rights e-auction on Monday, according to people aware of the matter.
On a day the rupee plunged to an all-time low and the stock market tanked, the Indian cricket board got a ringing endorsement from market forces for the Indian Premier League, its marquee property. While Disney Star won the IPL Indian sub-continent TV rights for a whopping ₹23,575 crore, Viacom18 bought the digital rights with a bid of ₹20,500 crore at the media rights e-auction on Monday, according to people aware of the matter.
The e-auction after the first two days showed the board’s earnings nearly tripled for the 2023-27 cycle from 2018-22.
At the end of proceedings on Tuesday, the collective media rights value rose to a whopping ₹45,950 crore (this includes the bids for non-exclusive digital rights), according to a Board of Control for Cricket in India official who asked not to be named. Bidding for the non-exclusive digital matches (98 games in 5 years) was still in progress.
According to a person aware of the matter, Disney Star retained the TV rights. The digital rights went to the Reliance Viacom 18 Bodhi Tree consortium, also comprising Uday Shankar and James Murdoch, who hold 40% stake in the company, the person added.
“Star has retained Indian TV rights of IPL for next five years while Viacom18 has got the digital rights. The combined per match value only from Indian TV and digital rights per game is 107.5 crore. With these bids, monopoly of one broadcaster in IPL ends,” a senior BCCI functionary told PTI on the condition of anonymity.
Details of who acquired which rights will officially be known only at the end of the process. Sony brought IPL to Indian TV homes for the first 10 years from 2008, while Star Sports (TV) and Hotstar (digital) were India’s IPL platforms for the next five.
Package A (Indian sub-continent TV tights) for 410 IPL matches across five seasons from 2023 to 2027 has been sold for ₹23,575 crore, which is effectively ₹57.5 crore per game, the official quoted above said. Package B (digital rights) fetched ₹20,500 crore, making BCCI richer by ₹44,075 crore after selling the two packages.
In terms of value, the TV bid was worth ₹12,525 crore more than the last cycle. Back then, it was Sony who had made the biggest bid worth ₹11,050 crore but was outsmarted by Star India’s all-or-nothing approach and thus fell in the face of their consolidated bidding.
With an extra 110 matches being played in this rights cycle, the per match value has gone up by 56% from last time ( ₹57.5 crore/match from ₹36.8 crore/match). “These are still very good numbers considering this space is not going to grow at the same speed as digital,” said another person aware of the matter. “This may be the last media rights cycle which saw enough interest. In another five years, TV value of this scale may not remain feasible,” the person added.
The biggest gains for BCCI came in the digital category. The ₹20,500 crore value is a big jump from the ₹3,900 crore top bid Facebook (now Meta) had made in the previous rights cycle. India has about 795 million broadband subscriptions and over 500 million smartphones, as per a Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry report of 2021. Forty million Indian households paid for 80 million online video subscriptions and 400 million subscribers consumed bundled content in 2021.
The bidders could not have missed these numbers. The report says the number of screens in India would reach one billion by 2024-25. But for Amazon opting out at the last moment, the final value in this category could have gone through the roof. It’s still an exponential rise in terms of per match value. Facebook’s highest digital bid was worth ₹13 crore per match in the previous cycle. That has risen to ₹50 crore per match.
