Star India wins the IPL media rights auction

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) today auctioned the media rights for India, rest of the world along with the digital media rights for the Indian Premier League (IPL). There was an intense bidding as the BCCI expecting historical figures from this auction. Star India and Sony were the two major competitors for the media rights. Eventually, it was Star who won the auction.

The IPL media rights for the next 5 five years 2018-22 have been sold to Star India for a whopping sum of INR 16,347.50 crore. Sony Pictures previously had bought the rights for the first ten years for INR 8200 crore which is almost half the money and for double the current period. This is a reflection of the fact that, over the years IPL has grown into a huge asset for the board and is seen as a prime source of revenue by the broadcasters as well.

A lot of big fishes like Facebook, Amazon, Reliance Jio, Star India, Sony Pictures, Discovery, Twitter, Yahoo, Sky, British Telecom and ESPN Digital Media had shown interest in putting up bids for the rights. From among them Sony, Star India, Airtel, Reliance Jio, Times Internet, Facebook, Yupp TV, Supersort, Gulf DTH OSN, Econet, Perform media, Followon Interactive and BeIN Sports were rendered eligible to bid.

Facebook had put up a bid of 3,900 crores while Airtel’s bid was 3280 crores, Jio, on the other hand, was willing to shell out 3,075.72 crores for the digital media rights. Star who eventually won the bid put up 1,443 crores for the digital rights. But given their collective bid of over 16000 crores for India, worldwide TV and digital media rights the board opted to hand them over all that was up for grabs.

After the announcement, Uday Shankar the CEO of Star in a press conference said, “I’d just like to convey my delight at being finally able to bring the IPL to what we believe is the rightful home for cricket in this country and elsewhere. We would also like to thank BCCI for choosing us as their appropriate partners. We compliment BCCI for running such an immaculately transparent process.”

“IPL is a very powerful property… We would remain very committed for the growth of sports in country and hope it would be driven by the power of cricket,” he added. “It was a conscious call to bid for global rights, we have presence on all forms, it made sense for us to win it for all the markets. Everyone picked up their strength and aspiration, and went for it,” Uday said.