The Indian cricket board’s reluctance to seek better price discovery ahead of the upcoming IPL and home bilateral media rights tender is weighing heavily on the industry.With about six months to go before the final IPL edition of the 2023-27 rights cycle begins, there is growing concern among cricket’s biggest stakeholders that the absence of a credible bidder other than JioStar will prevent an accurate assessment of the property’s value, and, in turn, deny the market the competitive tension that has driven IPL rights upwards for a decade.That sentiment was echoed by none other than Uday Shankar, the media entrepreneur who serves as vice-chairman of JioStar, at the recent ET World Leaders Forum.“Ten years ago, you would have multiple and serious media companies (around four) competing for major sports rights. You’d have four or more companies genuinely fighting for properties. Today, increasingly, it feels as if we are the only ones standing. And that’s not healthy,” Shankar said.“The fundamental issue is that the cost of the rights has risen dramatically. But the ability to monetise those rights hasn’t necessarily risen at the same rate. The value of sports is enormous, but the rights holder, broadcaster and platform all need to participate in a sustainable ecosystem,” he added.The worrying part of this narrative is the absence of a Plan B for Indian cricket. That JioStar will bid healthily for the IPL is a given: its subscription numbers are heavily leveraged against cricket consumption. What is baffling is the BCCI’s inability to bring more participants to the table.Players such as YouTube and Netflix have been engaging aggressively with sport in the West. YouTube’s move into rights aggregation and bundling has, in fact, become an industry trend of its own.YouTube increasingly treats sport not as a series of standalone rights acquisitions but as the anchor of a broader pay-TV and subscription ecosystem. Its seven-year deal for exclusive US distribution of NFL Sunday Ticket — worth a reported $2 billion a season — works both as a value-add for YouTube TV subscribers and as a standalone product sold through YouTube channels.Average revenue per user in the West bears little resemblance to what the subcontinent generates, which complicates the assumption that volume alone wins the argument. Even so, Indian cricket remains the only market in this part of the world worth a player like YouTube testing the waters in.More recently, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told The Economic Times that the streaming giant was interested in live sport, including cricket, but had no intention of becoming a “conventional full-season sports broadcaster”.If so, a property like the IPL sits squarely in Netflix’s territory. The storytelling potential of an India-first sports property speaks to a billion-plus domestic audience, a vast global diaspora, and to markets where cricket remains one of India’s most effective exports and a quiet instrument of soft power.“At some point, the economics have to make sense,” Shankar says. For that to happen, the responsibility must lie with the federation itself to market what is, by any measure, a high-value product.The IPL may be India’s most prized prime-time asset. But to assume that a media player several time zones away is fully clued in to the India story, without hearing it first-hand from the people writing it, is optimistic at best.Which is why it matters that the BCCI arrives at this tender with a genuine marketing strategy: one that puts the IPL in front of the dozens of media, technology and streaming platforms worldwide that could plausibly be interested.JioStar is the BCCI’s Plan A. The question is whether there is a Plan B, or a Plan C.
