Amazon's rivalry in India with oil-to-retail conglomerate Reliance Industries looks set to head to the cricket field, where they will likely battle media heavyweights for telecast rights to India's premier cricket league with its hundreds of millions of viewers.
"Winning this bid is critical to Reliance's long-term plans for its Jio platform and its digital expansion," said a source with direct knowledge of the company's strategy.
"Everything that has happened at Viacom18 in the last few months, like buying rights to the Spanish La Liga and setting up a sports channel, has been building up to this," the source said.Amazon, whose Prime Video platform recently began live-streaming cricket matches, wants to win the IPL rights to expand the platform's user base, another industry source familiar with the company's thinking said.
Industry sources expect flexibility from the BCCI given the prospects for record payments by bidders including a deep-pocketed digital-only player like Amazon. BCCI secretary Jay Shah, in an interview with Reuters, said the board had studied various models and proposals but he did not comment on details or the likely dollar value of the bids.Among the media majors, Disney India did not respond to a request for comment but Disney CEO Bob Chapek told a recent earnings teleconference that the company was confident of achieving its subscriber targets in India even without IPL rights.
"The IPL has got to a stage where it's now too big to fail and therefore everyone who is part of the ecosystem is propping it up," said advertising industry veteran Meenakshi Menon.Reporting by Shilpa Jamkhandikar in Mumbai; Additional reporting by Amlan Chakraborty in New Delhi and Sudipto Ganguly in Mumbai; Editing by Euan Rocha and Edmund KlamannSign up to our tech newsletter to get the latest news and trends in the global technology industry.
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