Mint Explainer: BCCI and media rights - an affair since 1992

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₹100 crore. But this jump in the valuation of media rights for the game in India took flight only after the birth of IPL – twenty-over cricket matches (T20) played by the best in the business for privately owned teams, all set against the backdrop of Bollywood spice.

In the debut season of 2008, Sony Pictures Network won the IPL broadcasting rights for a period of 10 years (2008-2017) with a bid of ₹8,200 crore. This value has now increased by up to six times over 14 years, in their latest sale.

Let's delve deeper into BCCI's latest media rights sales, a telling indicator of cricket's soaring prominence in the Indian media landscape. Given the staggering viewer numbers, revenue from advertisers has also been attractive, as per a report by the market research and analysis firm Redseer Strategy Consultants, IPL's linear TV and digital broadcasting right holders, respectively Star Sports and Jio Cinema, earned a staggering ₹4,700 crore through advertising.

They weren’t the only gainers from the advertising, the BCCI and the franchise owners in the league bagged ₹430 crore and ₹1,450 crore, respectively, taking the total earned from advertising to ₹10,120 crore and that’s just for the 2023 season alone. Last year, BCCI announced that it had sold media rights for IPL for a whopping ₹48,390 crore for a five-year period, making it second most valued sporting league in the world.

Disney Star retained their Indian sub-continent TV rights for ₹23,575 crore ( ₹57.5 crore/game), while the most sought-after India digital rights deal was acquired for ₹20,500 crore by the Reliance-backed Viacom18, which also won the non-exclusive package C, paying another ₹2,991 crore. The deal for packages A and B is for 410 matches over five years