IPL Media Rights War
I was 9 years old and we used to live in a small rented house. I was happy going to school and playing cricket after that. Life was easy and happy in small means and ends. The moment Sachin was playing, my whole life came to a standstill with my eyes glued to the screen and my emotional wavelength being directly proportional to the score he made.
17 years down the line, Sachin retired, I have grown up but the craze around cricket has remained the same in this nation. To an extent that the media rights of biggest cricket carnival is being traded for thousands of crores with big media players fighting to win it at any cost, literally!!!
After Disney Hotstar enjoyed its time in broadcasting IPL to the Indian audience, Viacom 18 has finally won the media rights to broadcast it digitally and paid 24000 crore for the same. Yes, you read it right- 24000 thousand crores for a game which goes for just 4 hours and for only 2 months in an entire year. While this was for Digital broadcast, for watching it on TV, Star paid 23500 crores. So in entirety, 50,000 crores for a sporting event of 2 months. This comes down to $15.1 million per match, while the rights for England’s Premier League cost $11 million for each game. But mind you, EPL goes on for an entire year, while IPL goes on for only 2 months. It seems that IPL is going ang getting bigger than EPL.
How on earth did Voot managed to get such a big deal?
Well one thing on earth is certain that even a stone moves in this country only when Ambani or Adani is there. Same thing happened in the case of this digital fight. Voot is backed by Reliance Industries and Uday Shankar, who at his previous stint helped Disney get the deal. With such a strong pedigree, it was imperative that Voot would have got the deal. However, one thing was quite interesting in this whole proposition. Viacom 18 even after having a channel in the form of sport 18 didnt fight for TV rights and kind of just gave up on that. The logical explanation for that can be the fact that somewhere Motabhai knows that digital is the game now, and hence went all in, in the game for digital rights.
But how is he going to recoup all this money back ?
Hostar earned around 15 crore for each game through advertising and around the same amount via its subscription. It had spent around 58 crore for each game. Viacom has spilled even more money than hotstar and hence I dont see any logical explanation which can justify the cost or is it more to the eyes than it seems ?
Viacom 18 is actually fighting for the broadcasting rights for big games and matches which includes, NBA archives, Laliga, Serie A and even football worldcup 2022. They own a sport franchise in the form of Mumbai indian and an entire football league of this country in the form of ISL. So, clearly motabhai is going all in terms of sports broadcasting rights of the country and he is able to see where the money lies much before it becomes visible to everyone else.
This article is written by Nikhil Gupta, founder PoonjiMitra.
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