Amazon.com is planning to withdraw from the rights to stream Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket matches, quoting sources Bloomberg reported on Friday, thus ceding one of the world’s most popular sporting contests to rivals from Walt Disney Co. to Reliance Industries Ltd.
According to the report, the rights had been estimated to fetch an unprecedented $7.7 billion (nearly Rs 60,000 crore).
The US company is planning to throw in the towel rather than get into a bidding war, the sources said. As Amazon has already invested more than $6 billion in the country, more spending merely for the online streaming rights to the league didn’t make business sense, they said.
The surprise pull out by Amazon leaves the field open to Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance, Disney, and Sony Group Corp., who’re betting big for the game that will help them dominate an Indian consumer market increasingly going online. Whichever company bags the deal could also bolster their position as a leading media player in India.
According to ANI report, quoting a source, the news agency reported that the IPL is all sell to sell its digital media rights from 2023 to 2027. ANI has tweeted the information saying that many big names in the entertainment industry have come forward to grab the media rights but a soruce in BCCI said that an ace industrial house could win the bid as they have shown tremendous interest in the league for a long time and has been part of the tournament also.
Amazon, which identified IPL among a half-dozen global sports franchises it’s interested in, had initially been determined to score a victory, Bloomberg News reported. The retail titan has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on European soccer rights, and has forged a deal to broadcast Thursday Night Football in the US at $1 billion a season until 2033.
The IPL is a multi-week tournament typically held in April and May every year. A tota of 10 teams comprising players from mostly the British Commonwealth countries play matches that last three hours each, a shortened and more entertaining format compared to the classic five-day test cricket.
The IPL, which drawins more than half-a-billion viewers, trails only English soccer and the National Football League in popularity globally, according to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).
IPL was valued at about $5.9 billion in 2020 by Duff & Phelps, now known as Kroll. That number could now be 25 per cent higher, according to Santosh N, managing partner at D and P India Advisory Services. The BCCI estimates it’s worth $7 billion.