After Paying $2.7 Billion for Indian Premier League Cricket Rights, Viacom18 to Stream Matches for Free
The rights to Indian Premier League cricket matches are some of the most expensive in the world, but that’s not preventing new rights holder Viacom18 from streaming matches for free. The Mumbai-based media company paid $2.7 billion to secure the IPL streaming rights last year, beating out rival Disney. Previously, Disney owned those rights and used them to attract users to its Disney+ Hotstar streaming service, however, given the fact that Disney was only making $0.76 per user per month in the country, the company opted instead to secure the traditional broadcast rights to the popular cricket league.
The fact that subscription video rates are markedly lower in India than in nearly every other region in the world, Viacom18 — a joint project between Paramount Global and Reliance Industries — is adopting a different strategy to monetize these new media rights. The company will make the games available to stream to as many people as possible for free in order to create advertising sales, according to Bloomberg.
The shift from using the IPL rights to generate subscriber growth to a way to generate ad revenue is notable both in India and in the streaming world in general. As financial circumstances around the world continue to worsen, the already-low subscriber rates in India make it difficult for any media company to recoup its investment in the increasingly expensive rights. So, by pivoting to an exclusively ad-supported model for the matches, Viacom18 is essentially looking to recreate the broadcast experience for viewers, which Disney already opted to pursue.
The weeks-long IPL games are expected to draw an audience of more than 550 million viewers, according to executives at Viacom18. The series of matches for this year will begin on March 31 and last for almost eight weeks, with each match running only about three hours. Users will be able to view any number of games for any amount of time on any internet-connected device thanks to Viacom18.
Last year, the price of cricket rights increased as more media firms competed for them to expand their fledgling streaming businesses. India’s adoption of the internet is accelerating rapidly, and both domestic and international media behemoths see India as a catalyst for growing their user bases.
These IPL rights — which Disney acquired when it purchased a majority of FOX — were one of the contributing reasons to Disney+’s success in India, attracting over 50 million subscribers in the country alone. However, after the cricket season had ended and Disney’s rights expired, the streamer had its first international subscriber loss in the fourth quarter of 2022, fueled exclusively by a dip of 3.8M customers to Disney+ Hotstar, which is expected to total 161.8 million by the end of 2022.
Disney+
Disney+ is a video streaming service with over 13,000 series and films from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, The Muppets, and more. It is available in 61 countries and 21 languages. It is notable for its popular original series like “The Mandalorian,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Loki,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” and “Andor.”