Viacom 18 Media Pvt Ltd, the joint venture between Mukesh Ambani and Paramount Global, secured the five-year media rights to the Indian national cricket team’s home matches as Asia’s richest man tightens his grip on viewership of the country’s most popular and lucrative sport.
The Mumbai-based media firm will both broadcast on TV and digitally stream the so-called bilateral series played by the Indian team against other countries, Jay Shah, the honorary secretary at the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the country’s governing body, said on Thursday.
According to The Economic Times newspaper, Viacom 18 spent Rs59.66 billion ($721 million), citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. That’s about the same price the rights went for in the previous auction but lower than the $750 million expected, Bloomberg News reported earlier this month. A spokesperson for Viacom 18 said they couldn’t immediately comment.
The successful bid by Ambani nonetheless consolidates his grip on cricket in the world’s most populous nation after capturing the five-year digital rights from Walt Disney Co. to the massively popular Indian Premier League short-format tournament last year. In contrast to the bilateral series, the cost to show the IPL surged almost threefold from the previous offering to about $6 billion, highlighting the demand for the condensed version of the game among viewers.
The proposed starting date of Thursday’s auction was postponed by a few weeks as the BCCI attempted to lure global media giants, including Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc., after lackluster interest following the IPL rights sale. The lukewarm response highlighted the struggle to make money from showing cricket aside from the IPL, amid weak advertising revenues.
In his annual address to shareholders on Monday, Ambani boasted about the “huge disruption” created by Viacom’s partly free-to-stream JioCinema platform, which registered hundreds of millions of viewers tuning in to watch the IPL this year.
“More people watched IPL on digital devices than on linear television, marking a tectonic shift in the way content is consumed in India,” Ambani said.
Disney, which now only broadcasts the IPL on TV, is weighing options for that business in India. Those include either an outright sale or setting up a joint venture with partners as the US media giant faces intensifying competition.
