Viacom18 Media Pvt., backed by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, scooped up the television and digital broadcasting rights to the new women’s Indian Premier League cricket tournament, which is looking to capitalize on fevered enthusiasm for the fast-paced format and growing popularity of female sports.
(Bloomberg) — Viacom18 Media Pvt., backed by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, scooped up the television and digital broadcasting rights to the new women’s Indian Premier League cricket tournament, which is looking to capitalize on fevered enthusiasm for the fast-paced format and growing popularity of female sports.
The joint venture between Paramount Global and Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. secured the five-year rights for 9.51 billion rupees ($116 million), according to a statement Monday from the Board of Control for Cricket in India, or BCCI.
This is the first time the local sports body is organizing a women’s T20 cricket tournament, mirrored on the lines of the wildly-popular men’s IPL, whose media rights the BCCI sold for $6.2 billion last year. Viacom18 paid about $3.1 billion for just the streaming rights of the men’s IPL in a heated auction where Walt Disney Co. secured the TV broadcast license for $3 billion.
“Viacom18’s ability to cross-promote its men’s and women’s IPL coverage will no doubt contribute to the appeal of the deal for the broadcaster,” said Jack Genovese, a research manager at London-based Ampere Analysis, who added that “interest women’s cricket and women’s sports in general is growing rapidly around the world.”
The latest sports rights acquired by Reliance show that Ambani wants a bigger slice of viewership in the cricket-crazy nation of almost 1.4 billion people to bolster his media and telecom businesses, with users consuming more content over smart phones. With women’s professional sports gaining traction, female athletes are also increasingly insisting on more influence and better compensation.
India’s Female Cricketers Will Be Paid the Same as Male Players
The powerful BCCI, which accounts for about 80% of the sport’s global revenue, this month invited tender offers for franchises to own and operate a women’s IPL team. Jay Shah, the BCCI’s honorary secretary, said in October that women cricketers will be paid the same match fees as men.
Along with bolstering diversity, the BCCI is ushering in the tournament as a new means to monetize the shorter T20 format, where matches last just a few hours, unlike days-long test cricket. IPL viewership trails only soccer’s English Premier League and the US National Football League, according to BCCI estimates.
At $23 million per season, the media rights to the women’s IPL is the world’s second-highest deal for a female sports league after the US women’s National Basketball Association, according to Ampere Analysis.
The new league “will revolutionize women’s cricket not just in India but across the globe,” Shah said in the statement. “The journey has well and truly started and we will take another major step this month when the five franchises are announced.”
(Updates with analyst comments from fourth paragraph.)
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