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Their bruising battle for control of a bankrupt Indian retailer isn’t over yet, and two of the world’s richest men are already heading for a second round in their contest — this time on the cricket field.
Mukesh Ambani, the petrochemicals and telecommunications tycoon, is expected to vie for broadcast and streaming rights of the Indian Premier League via his flagship Reliance Industries, going up against a rival bid by Amazon.com Both Amazon Chairman Jeff Bezos, the second-richest person in the world, and Ambani, No. 9, want to dominate India’s large retail industry. To that end, what could be a better route to commerce than cricket, the national passion of country’s 1.4 billion people?
IPL is as big a business in India as it is a craze: The total viewership of last year’s edition ran into 242 billion minutes. In 2017, Star Sports, the previous winner of the five-year deal for television and digital rights, paid $2.55 billion under Rupert Murdoch’s stewardship.
When Facebook Inc joined that fray, offering $600 million to livestream the matches, the Australian-born media mogul got a warning shot about how quickly the media landscape was changing. He went and sold his 21st Century Fox assets to Walt Disney & Co.
Now owned by Disney, Start Sports recently hawked 10-second TV spots for more than $22,000 apiece. To that, add the subscription and advertising revenue from the Disney+ Hotstar app, where the matches are shown live, and the current take — plus the growth potential — could easily justify a winning bid in excess of $5 billion this time around.
The cricket league is a testament to the growing heft of emerging-market consumers. Amazon’s Prime Video will get an edge over Netflix Inc and Disney in India if it can snag the streaming deal. The importance of that is not lost on Ambani, who wants his own consumer empire to sit atop the three pillars of carriage, content and commerce. With 400 million-plus customers, Reliance’s Jio is the country’s largest telco.
Ambani, Amazon and incumbent Disney are the most obvious hopefuls. Viewer fatigue with the match format, leading to a drop in ratings, is the biggest risk to the successful bidders for domestic and overseas TV and digital rights.
—Bloomberg