Star India Bag IPL Media Rights For Rs 16,347 Cr for Next 5 Years

Star India now hold the broadcast and digital rights for the IPL for the next 5 years.

(Photo: The Quint)

Indian cricket just got richer by Rs 16,347.50 crore.

The BCCI hosted IPL’s media rights auction in Mumbai on Monday and after a few rounds of discussions among the board members, Star India has emerged the sole rights owner across the world for the T20 tournament for the next five years.

The BCCI will now earn Rs 55 crore (approx) from every IPL match compared to Rs 43 crore, ironically, for each international match that India play.

How Star Emerged The Winner

IPL media rights were sold in seven different categories – TV rights for the Indian subcontinent, digital rights for the Indian subcontinent, both TV and digital rights for USA, Europe, Middle East, Africa regions and the rest of the world.

Bidders could send both individual bids for each category and also a consolidated bid for all the seven categories together.

This is where Star India came out on top with a consolidated number of Rs 16,347.50 crore.

Refer to the table above and notice the boxes in yellow – these were the individual bid winners for the seven categories. However, when they were all added together, the total amount coming to the BCCI added up to just Rs 15,819 crore. So, instead, the board chose to go with the bigger number on offer – Star India’s Rs 16,347 for the purchase of all seven categories together.

So now, for the next five years, Star India have complete ownership of any transmission of the IPL – in India and abroad, on TV or on the Internet!

Who Bid What

While Star India walked out of the Mumbai auction with all things IPL, there were 13 other bidders with big offerings in the individual bid category. Companies like Reliance Jio, Sony (the previous broadcast rights holder of the IPL), Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Yahoo all threw numbers into the hat.

Facebook even made a ‘winning’ individual bid of Rs 3,900 crore for the digital rights of IPL, beating Airtel’s Rs 3,280 crore and Jio’s Rs 3,075.72 crore.

The biggest fight, though, was for the broadcast rights of the tournament, where Sony made a top bid of Rs 11,050 crore, and Star India proposed a sum of just Rs 6,196 crore. Now, if only the other six category winners had accounted for another Rs 1,000 crore more – the IPL TV rights would have stayed with Sony.

In case you’re wondering, in 2008, Sony Pictures Network won the IPL media rights for a period of 10 years with a bid of Rs 8200 crore. The global digital rights of IPL for a period of three years was awarded to Novi Digital in 2015 for Rs 302.2 crore.

Now, the BCCI stands to earn nearly double the Rs 8200 crore in half the duration (five years) with earnings of Rs 3270 crore from IPL media rights per year.

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