Published: Sep 04, 2017, 01:45 PM (IST)
Edited: Sep 04, 2017, 01:27 PM (IST)
IPL news has already started making rounds and this time for the media rights auction. From the 24 organisations that bid for broadcast and digital rights, Star India won the IPL media rights for a period of 5 years, from 2018 to 2022, with a bid of INR 16,370.50 crores (about USD 2.55 billion). The highest territorial combined bid was INR 15,819.54 crores. To put things into perspective, Sony Pictures Network had won the IPL media rights for a period of 10 years with a bid of INR 8,200 crores in 2008, and the global digital rights of IPL for a period of three years was awarded to Novi Digital in 2015 for INR 302.2 crore. The auction taking place in Mumbai on Monday saw only 14 companies participating in the bid. After a technical glitch that halted the auction process, BCCI found Airtel, Reliance Jio, Times Network and Facebook eligible for digital rights.
After short listing, BCCI zeroed down upon Sony and STAR eligible for broadcast rights. Meanwhile, SuperSport, YuppTV, Econet, OSN are in contention for international broadcast rights. Earlier, ESPN Digital, Yahoo and Amazon were also in contention but they backed out from the bid.
BamTech did not make the cut as they failed to provide relevant documents while BeIN Sports did not provide the financial documents as per laws of Qatar. On Sunday, BCCI chairman Rahul Johri had told PTI that the media rights auction would provide historic numbers.
In June, VIVO retained the IPL title sponsorship for 5 years starting from 2018. VIVO won the bid for INR 2,199 crore. VIVO had earlier bagged the title sponsorship for 2-year period in 2016, reportedly at a cost of INR 100 crore per year.
