The start of the 2023 Indian Premier League (IPL) season on 31st March also marks the beginning of its new domestic media rights cycle and the introduction of a new broadcasting business model. 

Last year, the world’s leading franchise cricket tournament struck record-breaking deals in its Indian media rights sale for the 2023 to 2027 seasons, selling linear TV rights to Disney’s Star India while Viacom18 acquired the streaming packages. The value of the rights per season has escalated to almost INR97bn (~$1.24bn), almost three times the value of rights in the previous cycle. The deal means the IPL surpasses four of the five major European football leagues in terms of domestic rights value from 2023.

A key element of the new deal is that the linear broadcast and digital rights have been acquired by separate buyers. Star India will be showing the competition on TV through its highly popular premium channels as well as offering a selection of fixtures on its free-to-air channel, while Viacom18 plans to stream the matches for free to all Internet users via the JioCinema app. Neither service will therefore be able to offer games to fans on an exclusive basis.

India has over 250m TV households and, at the same time, Indian sports fans are shifting their consumption habits towards online video viewing. But the extensive reach of both distribution methods – and the huge appeal of cricket for Indian viewers - has driven up the value of both linear and digital packages for the IPL at a time when more developed competitions across the global market are experiencing slower domestic growth. 

Comparing the national broadcast rights deals of other leading competitions against the relative size of their domestic TV market highlights how heavily Indian services have invested in the IPL through the latest agreement. Among major European football leagues, for example, the value of domestic rights is stagnating and accounts for an increasingly small share of the market’s wider TV revenues. In the US, meanwhile, rights to the NFL, despite growing by 58% in value in the new cycle from 2023 and having comfortably the most lucrative domestic rights value among sports competitions, will still account for only 6% of total US TV market revenue. The IPL, on the other hand, will account for 10% of India’s total TV market value from 2023, up from 5% in the previous cycle.

The scale of the investment is an indication of the evolving viewing habits among Indian sports fans, and the willingness of local content providers to maximise their reach through tapping into both linear and digital markets. But with Viacom18 in particular rejecting the subscription model and Star India offering select games for free, the challenge now will be to justify this major investment by monetising these rights through advertising revenue.