OPINION
Follow UsThe bidding papers for the next five-year cycle of the Indian Premier League, put out by the BCCI after a thorough discussion with consultants, have revealed an interesting facet of where the sport is heading at the moment. It has been a staggering reminder of how far the sport can take the marketing route to ensure a distilled field.
The board has set Rs 32,890 crore as the combined reserve price under four packages, hoping to at least double the amount from the last five-year rights cycle ending in 2022, garnering nearly Rs100 crore per match, whereas the last time the same was roughly equated to Rs 54 crore a game in a five-year period.
For the next cycle, the BCCI have smartly added a new bucket to maximize their profit. Unlike previous tenders, which had three buckets, this time the package has four buckets - India subcontinent TV rights, India subcontinent digital rights (exclusive and non-exclusive), non-exclusive digital rights (18 matches), and the rest of the world. The third one hopes to capitalize on high-stakes games like the opening game, play-offs, and some high-stake night games.
Now that four separate buckets are there, the solution, however, wouldn’t be straightforward. The winner of the India subcontinent TV rights can challenge the winner of the India subcontinent digital rights (exclusive and non-exclusive) and force a re-bid. The same goes for Bucket B to Bucket C. It would throw a potential spanner in the works of the media giants but the board will laugh their way to the bank.
To understand this in detail, one needs to understand the basic phenomenon when Star India won the rights in 2017. Star had put up a lesser bid for both TV and digital rights whereas Facebook made a bid for digital rights with Rs 3900 crore for five years period, which roughly equates to Rs 800 crore a year, signaling an eight-fold increase from Star Sports’ 100 Crore per year deal in 2015. Sony, on the other hand, had put up a bid of over Rs 11,000 crores for TV rights, once again bettering Star there.
However, Star had played their game smartly there. They secured an upward margin of 3.2% over 15819.51 crores, the sum total of all the highest bids put together, in their global bids counter to take home the lucrative rights entirely to bolster their Indian cricket coverage universe.
Helmed by Uday Shankar, the then President of The Walt Disney Company Asia Pacific and ex-chairman of Star India and The Walt Disney Company India, the Star India package provided an end-to-end coverage for all home international, domestic, IPL matches to go with their ICC rights. But given Uday Shankar decided to step down from Star India and join Viacom18 late last year - a Reliance-backed ambitious conglomerate - it has put up a different dimension to the battle. No one knows the Indian cricketing market better than Uday Shankar - and that would keep all the rivals, including the Zee-Sony combined entity in check.
However, is it really possible for them to generate revenues to match up the expenses of the broadcasters? From the interest of the giants, you’d genuinely be compelled to believe so. Disney, Amazon, Sony-Zee, and TV18-Viacom have already bought the ITT document whereas Apple and Netflix have also shown interest.
“As the price is going to increase pro-rata, what stops the BCCI from conducting 94 matches from the next year itself. For us to bid, we need to know,” an executive told Times of India. “The issue is, the cost goes up with an increase in matches, but the revenue doesn’t. You can increase ad inventory, but the distribution, syndication, and other revenue streams don’t match up.”
But now this gives an opportunity for the broadcasters to step up their game and leverage the media-consumption habits of the Indians. Now that the Brand IPL is getting stronger, the recall value of the entire property is set to proliferate through the roofs. It is, in a way, all or nothing.
