Here’s a deal straight out of Rupert Murdoch’s playbook circa 1994. Just like Murdoch established Fox back then by paying an exorbitant-seeming sum ($1.6 billion at the time) for the rights to broadcast the NFL, Live Current Media is paying $50 million over ten years for the exclusive online rights to official content from the Indian Premier League (a new cricket league in India with a shorter, more fan-friendly version of the game—first match is tomorrow). Cricket is huge in India and elsewhere. It is a sport perfect for online distribution, with fans spread all over the world. Globally there are about one billion fans, estimates Live Current Media. And the Indian Premier League has already on track to generate $2 billion overall this year.
As part of the deal, Current Live will create and operate official sites for the Indian Premier League (IPLT20.com) and the Board of Control for Cricket (BCCI.tv). Current Live will pay the Indian Premier League $3 million a year, and the BCCI $2 million a year for the exclusive online rights to official photos, video footage, live scoreboards, match results stats, a fantasy cricket league, ticketing, fan polling, contests, and more. It is a pretty big commitment for Live Current Media, a domain-name company with revenues of $9 million last year and a net loss of $2 million. The Canadian company is basically betting its entire $51 million over-the-counter market cap on this deal.
But Live Current also owns cricket.com, which will be seeded with content from this deal. Kulveer Taggar, the former CEO of Auctomatic (which was recently purchased by Current Live Media) and one of the internal champions of the deal tells me:
The Cricket.com vision is to create a site for cricket fans regardless of the country or specific league. Passionate cricket fans may be interested in watching a different league or may just want to stay up on all the cricket news they can get access to and that is what Cricket.com will deliver. Following this significant relationship with the IPL and BCCI, Live Current will be speaking with other cricket organizations and determining relationships for content, media access and distribution as appropriate.
There is no question that global multinationals are looking for ways to target the high-growth Indian market and that cricket is one of the few channels through which the majority of Indians are engaged with. It’s not surprising to see sponsors of the league such as Pepsi, Honda, and Citibank. It is not a local Indian phenomenon. There are major business players globally tapping into this market.
He expects to launch Cricket.com by the end of the summer or early fall. So really, this deal is all about gaining exclusive content for Cricket.com. But did Current Live Media pay too much for the rights? Taggar argues not:
Recently the Cricinfo.com site was sold to ESPN for over $50 million and while the site had good traffic, it did not have exclusive content rights negotiated for that price.
In other words, he wants to take on ESPN.com. Will this be the start of bidding wars for the exclusive online rights for other sports leagues, or does this only make sense for cricket? Whle you ponder that and wait for Cricket.com to launch, cricket fans can check out Cricketwires, a recently-launched Digg-like site for all things cricket.
With over 1 billion Indians, a growing proportion of which are getting richer (with a stronger buying power) it’s a great move – worth the money!
what a steal
just to add: although a very small proportion of which have access to Internet…
Still worth the money
It will be difficult to challenge cricinfo with the ground setup they have and a decade of infrastructure they’ve invested in. But if Live Current guys *seriously* focus on cricket, the market is big enough and there is money to be made. I would guess no one would put in 50mil without being serious about it. As a cricket addict, competition is good!
All that is missing is for these guys to start streaming the damn games…please?
-Zaid
@ Mike T
Here is the corrected version of what u just said….
With over 1 billion people in India and 75% of which are below poverty line, a growing proportion 2% of which are getting richer….its a great move !!!
You cannot Judge by the Population Mike, you have to actually visit India to find out what’s it made up of. There is no equality in India, Indians have casts, they have total of 5 casts. So only the upper cast people are getting richer, not the rest 4 casts, they are same as what they were before.
just to add: There is only 1% broadband penetration in India, and these broadband cannot even stream live videos !
Still worth the money ???
So these are the fellows who are forcing other cricket websites to pay ridiculous money in order to publish even photos from the IPL. Yeesh!
@ Ghaus: Yes, we have a diabolical caste system, but it is not true that only the highest caste in progressing. It is, however, unfortunately true that a major rich-poor divide is opening up.
http://www.cricinfo.com FTW
You underestimate the audience of NRIs (Non resident indians) worldwide who would totally dig this move. This is typical shrewdness by Kul.
@Ghaus
How many times have you visited India? Or, do you live in India? I guess you haven’t see the quality of life improve for millions of people over the last decade+.
Of course, poverty is still a big problem. But that doesn’t mean that the country is not making any progress at all towards reducing it.
You don’t know too much about India…. 50 million is a steal, especially when it comes to cricket.
There is no equality anywhere in the world and there are scores of examples, both past and current, that prove that. Don’t just pick on one country.
Ghaus I guess you’re an Indian.. so am I… but you still don’t get it do you?! Anything even remotely related to Cricket is worth the money in the Indian Subcontinent. You never see in terms of the immediate profits that your investment might return(that never usually happens).. you look in to the future profits and growth. The way Europe is crazy for soccer, America for football, Indians are for Cricket.. and since the league is backed by the International Cricket Council unlike the ICL (promoted by the Zee group) it is bound to get more popular.
And do you really think only the Indians are crazy for cricket? There are other people in the world too who look for cricketing news on the internet. The internet is an open medium and it reaches far beyond television. And since broadband is growing at a rapid pace in India too, I don’t think your concern is really justified. The fastest and affordable connection is 2mbps at the moment (nothing great) and the consumer is not dumb. They want more for less. The required infrastructure is there. The ISPs are being forced to up their games. Things can very well change overnight my friend.
@Raman VikramAdith
We hear you about the photos, we’ll work on this.
And, Cricinfo is a great site.
And I can very well stream online video.. it might not be HD.. but its there! A 60 year old country of a billion people.. a democracy.. the progress is there but it is bound to be slow.
50 million is a steal. It would be worth 500 million in 5 years.
Deccan Chargers all the way.
Cricket getting TechCrunched, this sure is new!
@Kulveer – I think you guys run the official site as well? That was down for the last two days. Surely, this shouldn’t be happening to what is probably the most talked about thing in India these days.
Exclusive rights, eh? I guess that’s why the news was being held back. But since its a 10 year deal, the prospects are bright indeed, even if the internet connections here aren’t ready for rich media just yet.
@Abhinav
dude – all this stuff has happened incredibly quickly as you can imagine and DNS propagation was taking it’s time. Sorry it was down.
Well, it depends how good or bad this deal is, and it depends on whether the league is successful. Jury will be out on that once the games begin.
Erick – your headline is a bit misleading. It appears that these folks have online rights to content from this ‘league’, not to ‘Indian cricket’. So far, there are no real precedents of a professional sports league being successful in India. That said, perhaps this is the one that will set the precedent – time will tell. There is a 4 year old Professional (field) Hockey League, and I do not know how profitable that is.
I feel that Cricket is a game in need for a shorter version of the game. The current formats do not lend well to media coverage in the American sense. The games are too long, and too often, the outcome is known after about half the game. So maybe the IPL solves those problems, and is a success. Best to luck to them, and to IPL.
Is $50M too much…? Well, it is actually only a $5M at a time bet on an yearly basis. If IPL fails in a year, then obviously all bets are off (I hope…!)
>>>
Best to luck to them, and to IPL.
>>>
Meant to say ‘Best of luck to them, and to Kulveer and his team.’
Oh. DNS sucks sometimes, especially when it takes hours to propogate. A friend of mine and I opened Bangalore’s website at the same time and saw two completely different sites because we were using different DNS servers!
Anyway, lets hope it stays healthy for the season. One more thing – are you the same guys doing the Fantasy Cricket app for facebook?
@Ghaus:
Time to upgrade your software, seems to me like you are running a way out of date version, judging by your perceptiveness about the potential of India.
Or perhaps it is a hardware problem…?
watchout Cricket ..it’s up and coming….forget soccer, baseball..there is no more craze there!
Ghaus, I accept your criticism – a small percentage out of that billion will be able to watch cricket online (I added it in my second comment).
However, India is obsessed with cricket (in a good way of course) and PCs are becoming more affordable to an increasing number of Indians, thus this is a good deal – as other commenters wrote – it’s a steal.
In 10 years the number of Indians with PCs (in India) will be much much greater, and I am happy for this country.
Do you guys also maintain the official IPL website.
http://iplt20.com/
The Countdown looks totally messed up. Its calculating the time based on MY local time (PST)(most probly picking up the time from my desktop in Seattle).
The event starts on Apr 18th – 20:00 (IST)
Please Fix it.
SopCast. …. Watch it for free
Holly COW (excuse da pun? :/) $50 for 10 year exclussive? That’s a not a steal that’s a butt fuckin’
@ Mike and other commentators
I totally agree with your points, even Pakistanis are crazy to watch Indian Premier League (so add the number of Pakistani users too). But i think this will take off in 2009 or 2010 when Broadband will further penetrate and PCs will become more affordable.
@Ro: Yes we maintain that site, sorry about the countdown we’re looking into that now
@Abhinav: Yep we built the Fantasy Cricket facebook app as well. let me know if you have any feedback on it.
Kulveer,Good luck on this new venture I have much riding on your success.I hope that you do better with this than the Brazil.com site which I feel is inferior to other similar sites and doesn’t imove me to visit Brazil.I’m sure it’s a work in progress and hope to see more robust sites from you new guys in the future.Take care…………………….
@Harjeet: While the countdown is being fixed on http://iplt20.com/ the DLF IPL logo at the bottom of the page, gives a 404.
Now – that is exciting and I can see myself watching more TV on the laptop since its not here on regular TV!
Hmmm… The NFL and other league formats worked well for TV, NFL innovated itself for american television… and made it a great experience for TV.
What kind of a “game” is IPLT20 ? web or television?
as for me I love football…
@Senthil
as far as Indian sub continent is considered it dosent matter .. Cricket is like religon over there !
it would be watched on TV/Web/Groud /Road side/Restaurants etc. with the same entusiasum.
@30…
@31 is right!
This IPL is going to be huge all over the cricket loving world, with stars from most countries (except England, the home of 2020 cricket). A lot of that has higher broadband penetration; UK, AUS, NZ etc.
50 MIL is pretty cheap considering the super restrictive attitude of the IPL towards media access; it’s very exclusive rights. In fact cricinfo has totally been denied any access, so i heard.
But if they launch cricket.com in the autumn they will have missed the entire first season.
Go the Super Kings!
$50 million for 10 year exclusive is not a steal for broadcasting Indian cricket matches, give me a break.
Indian Premier League won’t make that much in ticket sales in the stadiums, and they will only make a fraction of that income in online subscriptions.
Goot to see cricket on TC.
I think shelling out $50M for this is a bold move. I am sceptical of its success though.
I don’t think having exclusive rights will gurantee success in media 2.0. Cricinfo has the traffic and is the equivlanet of ESPN.com (actually owned by them) for cricket.
These folks want to be like MLB.com for cricket. It is good that they own cricket.com domain. That is a good asset.
They may have a shot at success if they can offer streaming cricket coverage at reasonable prices. But their user base for such a service would be Indians living outside India. Indians in India can watch cricket on TV and won’t pay for it. Bandiwdth is a problem too.
$50 million for exclusive online rights for 10 years of IPL is a steal guys! These guys can make money just by streaming to USA, Europe(UK, Germany, France) and Australia. Expatriate Indians and other cricket lover around the world will be ready pay to watch online.
As for India, I would agree with others it doesn’t have the broadband penetration to create a significant impact. Maybe the mobile version of the site could be a hit because of the burgeoning mobile user base.
Quite an exciting time for cricket!
Ill continue to use MyP2P from my Cricket Needs until they provide ad supported cricket streams on a Worldwide basis .
http://www3.myp2p.eu/
Seems like a good deal to me as the indian following is huge.
Cricket is all over SopCast, PPLive, etc. Anybody who has broadband and wants it can get it for free now, and there’s nothing an official licensee can do about it. Wouldn’t put my $50mm on that.
lennyr and others, just to clarify – we are not talking about live streaming rights – we are talking about exclusive online representation of the BCCI and the Indian Premier League including a host of exclusive content including access to the top Indian players and rights to all photographs taken at the ground during the IPL.
And while we are leading up to the launch of cricket.com, we have made our Fantasy Cricket Facebook application live at http://apps.fac...fantasycricket/ – a tutorial video can be found at cricket.com
@ Ankur & Kulveer – without knowing your complete game plan, it’s impossible to say whether it’s good or bad, but your bet seems to be on providing content to sportsfans who are a) non-discriminating in terms of their content needs, i.e. not much history of inter-city cricket rivalry in India and happy with TV broadcast itself b) of a higher age range than most who follow sports. I don’t particularly see what you provide that cricinfo or other cricket websites can’t, save for exclusive photos of the games and a slightly more lucrative domain name. It will very interesting to see how your bet plays out.
Hi Guys, i feel many peope here are commenting just for the sake of it, without knowing the actual information. Most important thing in the contract is that IPL20 is not allowed to show the matches online, so guys no point in discussing penetaration of broadband etc. Site is developed only for the news and other stats. So just check out your knowledge before commenting!