The Indian sports media landscape has for long been dominated by the duopoly of Star India and Sony Pictures Networks India (SPNI). However, the TV broadcasting giants are beginning to see competition for sports rights, albeit at a lower scale, from digital platforms like Facebook, Amazon Prime Video, and FanCode, which is owned by the $5-billion sports tech company Dream Sports. The biggest challenge to the duopoly is expected to come from Reliance Jio/Network18 combine.

While Star and Sony continue to own the rights to key cricket and non-cricket properties, digital businesses like Amazon, Facebook and Dream Sports-owned FanCode have been experimenting with smaller sports properties including New Zealand Cricket, West Indies Cricket, and LaLiga among others. The proliferation of smartphones and the drop in 4G data prices has led to a sharp jump in sports consumption on digital.

The Indian Premier League (IPL) media rights auction in 2017 was the first time when digital players had taken a serious shot at sports rights acquisition. Facebook, Reliance Jio, and Airtel had surprised everyone by placing competitive bids for the IPL digital rights. Facebook had bid Rs 3,900 crore for the five-year rights. Bharti Airtel had bid Rs 3280 crore, followed by Reliance Jio, with a bid of Rs 3075.72 crore.

It is pertinent to note that different platforms have different objectives when it comes to sport rights acquisition. For Amazon, it is about using live sports to grow its e-commerce business. Facebook sees sports content as a means of driving engagement and building stickiness. FanCode, which is owned by the $5 billion fantasy sports platform Dream Sports, looks at sports as an opportunity to fill in the white spaces that have not been addressed by the traditional broadcasters. For telcos, it is about customer acquisition/retention and improving ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).

Amazon and Facebook are global tech giants with deep pockets who will not shy away from taking big bets in sports. FanCode, on the other hand, is still in the nascent stage of its development and can hardly afford the kind of financial commitments that are required for big cricketing properties. It had recently raised $50 million from its parent company Dream Sports’ investment arm to accelerate the growth of the platform.

As the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) prepares to come out with the tender document for the next cycle of Indian Premier League (IPL) media rights auction, all eyes will be on Amazon, Facebook, and Reliance Jio besides the main contenders Star and Sony. According to the market buzz, the ICC is also planning to kick-start the process of awarding the media rights for the next cycle soon. However, this couldn’t be independently verified.

Yannick Colaco, Co-Founder, FanCode, noted that the platform has inked many content partnerships in the recent past. These include deals with the England Cricket Board for ‘The Hundred’, the ICC men’s and women’s pathway events for the ICC World Cups, the West Indies Cricket Board for all domestic and international events in the Caribbean, the Caribbean Premier League, domestic state cricket leagues of Kerala, Pondicherry, Jharkhand, and K7 Kabaddi.

Triplecom Media Founder and CEO Kunal Dasgupta said that the digital players are in an experimental stage and don’t pose a threat to the big broadcasters. He also said that the growth of IPL viewership on Disney+ Hotstar has been one of the key driving factors behind sports rights acquisition by digital platforms.

“Facebook experimented with LaLiga and gave up because they realised that they don’t have the capacity to monetise. FanCode also bought football rights and sold it back to Viacom18. Later on, they took rights to ICC pathway events. So they sold one and bought one. Everybody is experimenting to see if monetisation is possible or not,” said Dasgupta, who used to head Sony’s India broadcast business.

On the upcoming IPL media rights auction, Dasgupta feels that Star and Sony will not let non-traditional players to easily walk away with the coveted IPL media rights. He also noted that unlike pure play digital players, Star and Sony have a presence on both TV and digital. The two broadcasters also have the ability to monetise a costly property like IPL, he added.

“Nobody is going to take a big jump like that and put a $3 billion bid. I am hearing that the IPL media rights valuation this time is going to be even higher due to the fact that they are adding two more teams and the number of matches will go up. Then there will be inflation on the amount paid by Star in 2017. I don’t see non-traditional players picking up IPL rights in this round. Plus, platforms like Facebook, Amazon and FanCode don’t have the experience of streaming bigger events,” Dasgupta asserted.

Dasgupta foresees strategic alliances being forged between tech and traditional companies for the upcoming IPL media rights auction. “BCCI has a rule whereby TV broadcasting experience is required. In India, all said and done, television will continue to be important for the next few years. Without TV, the whole viewership of IPL will collapse.”

According to a senior executive with a leading broadcasting company, the digital platforms don’t pose an immediate threat to traditional media companies, but they will emerge as big challengers in the near future.

“Between TV and digital, the broad conversion is about 10-15% on sports. So, for every Rs 100 that TV earns, the digital earnings will be Rs 10-15. If things are buoyant for digital, this number might jump to Rs 30. This will be the main determinant of IPL rights value also. Whoever acquires any rights (IPL, ICC, BCCI), will do so by keeping TV as the focal point. However, if one takes a five-year horizon then this equation has to change as the reach of TV has also saturated,” the executive said.

The executive also stated that Star India, SPNI and Jio will be the main contenders for the IPL. “Whoever buys IPL rights will have to consider the fact that a 10-second IPL spot will have to be sold at Rs 20 lakh. Digital will gain, but the change will not be that drastic. OTT might look appealing, but it is TV which will drive monetisation for cricket,” the executive added.

Anirudh Kalia, Global Practice Head – Media at a leading digital services company, said that the IPL rights bid for the 2023-2027 period will see a major slugfest between traditional and new-age companies. “With incumbent Star/Disney on one side and the likes of Reliance, Facebook and Amazon on the other. All these bidders have dipped their toes into sports in the last few years and are seasoned players now – with Facebook having taken non-live ICC rights, Amazon having Premier League Football and many others across the world.”

Last year, Amazon Prime Video, the streaming platform owned by Amazon, had forayed into live sports by acquiring New Zealand Cricket rights for the Indian market in a six-year deal. Recently, the platform expanded its catalogue by adding the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) games to its live sports offering in India.

Speaking to a leading business newspaper last year about the platform’s cricket foray, Amazon Prime Video Country Manager Gaurav Gandhi had said that “expanding into a space which the country loves makes sense”. He had further noted, “You have to work for the rights structures, when the rights are available and so on. I do feel that it does add an interesting dimension to our overall offerings. We’re happy to look at each individual opportunity that goes by.”

Facebook’s experiment with live sports in India ended rather prematurely. After acquiring the La Liga media rights for the Indian subcontinent in 2018, the platform decided against renewing the deal. Eventually, the LaLiga rights got acquired by Viacom18, a 51:49 JV between Reliance Industries-owned TV18 and Viacom. The entertainment network has also acquired rights to Italy’s Serie A and France’s Ligue1 besides the Abu Dhabi T10 league, a Dubai-based cricket property.

Facebook’s Director of Sports Media and League Partnerships Rob Shaw has been quoted as saying that the traditional media rights deals aren’t compatible with its current video business model. “We also don’t think they’ll create the most sustainable value for the industry moving forward,” he had stated.

Even though its live sports experiment in India didn’t last long, Facebook has been building its non-live sports portfolio through partnerships with the International Cricket Council (ICC) and SPNI. In September 2019, Facebook had signed a four-year exclusive digital content rights deal for ICC global events in the Indian subcontinent. In the last one year, it has also partnered with SPNI to bring exclusive video-on-demand content to fans from India’s tour of Australia, Sri Lanka and England.

According to Colaco, sports fandom has grown significantly in India, and so has the demand for everything around sport. Besides live-streaming, FanCode also offers services like live scores, in-depth analysis, stats, fan merchandise and live-streaming. “Acquiring rights of long tail content is part of the value proposition that we provide to sports fans,” he noted.

While traditional broadcasters are focussed on distributing and monetising mass viewership events, FanCode sees value in more niche sports events that have strong and avid fan bases. “Our goal is to unlock the potential of digital to provide fans of many of these events with a personalised and immersive consumption experience, monetisation of which is primarily driven directly from the consumer,” Colaco noted.

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