- BCCI will be conducting an online auction starting from June 12.
- Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Industries Limited, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Inc, and The Walt Disney Co are the top players competing for the broadcasting rights of one of the most popular sports leagues in the world
- If Mukesh Ambani wins the broadcasting rights of IPL, it will be another major move by the conglomerate in the media business after the acquisition of Network 18 almost a decade ago.
Indian Premier League is the most successful franchise in the world and arguably the second most popular in the world after Football Leagues. Now India’s top industrialists and international companies are after the broadcasting rights of IPL.
Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Industries Limited, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Inc, and The Walt Disney Co are the top players competing for the broadcasting rights of one of the most popular sports leagues in the world. Besides these, the traditional companies active in this industry like Sony Group Corp., Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd., and fantasy-sports platform Dream11 are also in the race.
BCCI will be conducting an online auction starting from June 12. The auction will allow the winner or winners — there are four baskets of rights to bid for — to globally telecast matches of India’s top cricket league between 2023 and 2027 via live streaming and TV broadcast.
“Cricket is the second-biggest sport in the world with two-and-a-half billion fans and IPL is like its Super Bowl,” said Anton Rublievskyi, head of Parimatch, a betting company that advertised at the Indian Premier League (IPL) last year.
This is the second time Mukesh Ambani led Reliance and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon will be competing. The first round was for the takeover of Future Retail Limited in which Mukesh Ambani successfully took over the stores of the company while Amazon tried to legally entangle the deal.
IPL broadcasting rights are too lucrative to be missed by any consumer-facing businesses, and this is the reason that the franchise brings billions of dollars every year to the coffers of BCCI. In the ongoing IPL season, many big business houses like Tata Group as well as a few newbies in the block like Byju’s won the advertisement rights.
If Mukesh Ambani wins the broadcasting rights of IPL, it will be another major move by the conglomerate in the media business after the acquisition of Network 18 almost a decade ago. The company aims to expand its media offerings as it wants Jio to become a one-stop solution for consumers for the majority of their needs.
Similar to his father, Mukesh Ambani is known for establishing domination in the markets. In the early days of the business, his father monopolized the thread-making business, and Mukesh Ambani has himself done the same in the refining and petrochemical business. Now, his company is trying to dominate the retailing business.
Amazon is known for its unethical business practices in inhumane working conditions for workers. We live in a world where capitalistic giants with their billions of dollars in bank accounts spar with each other for fun to dominate a country to churn massive profits.
On any given day, it is better to have domestic players dominating positions in the markets rather than the foreign ones. And the government should actively support the Indian enterprises in cornering the foreign ones rather than being neutral and taking the moral high ground. It is good to see Mukesh Ambani winning the race against Amazon without much government help, but where the govt help is needed to promote Indian businesses against foreign ones (like in defence), it must be provided with the same.
