On Tuesday, the Indian Premier League (IPL)—the country’s top professional cricket league—announced that it sold television and streaming rights for roughly $6 billion over the next five years, three times as much as the rights demanded five years ago. The deal vaulted the Indian cricket league to the world’s second most valuable sports property on a per game basis. The IPL rights are now worth $15.1 million per match, just behind the U.S. National Football League’s $17 million per game and ahead of the third-place English Premier League soccer, whose matches are valued at $11 million apiece.
The Walt Disney Co., via its local subsidiary Star India, purchased the IPL’s television rights for $3.02 billion, but it lost out on the top prize—the league’s streaming rights, which Disney had previously owned and used to attract 50 million subscribers to its streaming platform. Some analysts see the loss as a win for Disney; its numbers in India just weren’t adding up. “Ultimately we think a disciplined approach to these rights makes sense,” Benjamin Swinburne, equity analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note published before the auction. Disney needed to hold the line, he said, even if it meant the entertainment giant misses out on the opportunity to stream a sport that regularly attracts over 100 million total viewers—roughly equal to last year’s Super Bowl audience—per match.
Disney entered India’s streaming market in 2019 after completing its purchase of 21st Century Fox for $71 billion. The blockbuster acquisition gave Disney ownership of Star India, which had its own streaming service and owned the streaming rights to IPL matches. That year, Disney merged its streaming service Disney+ with Star India’s to create Disney+ Hotstar on the subcontinent and showed its first IPL cricket matches.
“Disney has been synonymous with cricket in India, and people have been downloading or subscribing to them just because of the IPL season,” says Tarun Pathak, research director with Counterpoint Technology Market Research.
Over the next three years, Disney’s streaming business exploded, with 50 million paid subscribers signing up for Disney+ Hotstar. The platform in India accounts for over one-third of Disney’s total streaming subscribers worldwide, and Disney executives have credited the IPL rights in particular for stoking Disney+’s global growth. “A little over half of [Disney+’s 8 million new global subscribers] were from Disney+ Hotstar, which benefited from the start of the new IPL season,” Christine McCarthy, senior executive vice president and chief financial officer at Disney, said during an investor call in May, referring to subscriber growth in the first quarter of this year.
At this year’s auction, IPL split rights to broadcast its games into two mediums: television and streaming.
Experts say the streaming rights represented the top prize since the owner will be able to tap into a streaming market that’s expanding at a breakneck pace; every day, more than 200,000 Indians go online for the first time. India’s population of internet users is expected to grow to 900 million in 2025 from 653 million today.
The winner of the streaming package, with a bid of $3.05 billion, was Indian media company Viacom18, a venture backed by Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries in partnership with the U.S.’s Paramount Pictures.
Pathak says the deal was particularly beneficial to Mukesh Ambani, CEO of Reliance Industries and India’s richest man. “It’s a big blow for Disney…and a major win for Ambani,” he says. Tens of millions of subscribers may immediately transition from Disney’s streaming services to the Ambani-controlled Viacom18, Pathak says. Ambani can leverage the streaming rights to boost any number of Ambani-owned businesses, such as cross-selling goods on Reliance-owned e-commerce platform JioMart during cricket streams, he says.
Disney, meanwhile, likely was not as interested in the IPL streaming rights this time around. Despite Disney+ Hotstar powering the entertainment giant’s streaming growth, the increase in India subscribers comes with an asterisk: Users in the country pay far less for the service than do subscribers elsewhere. The Disney+ Hotstar subscription in India with access to live IPL matches costs as low as $6.40 per year, a fraction of the $79.99 a Disney subscription costs annually in the U.S. So it’s hard to justify pouring billions into IPL rights to add subscribers to a streaming service that’s generating $500 million in revenue per year.
And it’s not as if the TV rights won’t earn Disney money. Streaming may be growing faster than television, but Barclays estimates that the vast majority of IPL advertising revenue—$400 million out of $450 million in 2021—go to the television rights holders rather than streaming services.
Disney’s share price dropped 5.8% on Tuesday alongside a market selloff.
“We made disciplined bids with a focus on long-term value,” Rebecca Campbell, chairman for international content and operations at Disney, said in a statement about the auction to Fortune.
Investors cheered the company’s restraint.
“We believe Disney’s decision to compete aggressively for broadcast rights while letting go of digital rights was right,” Barclays analysts Kannan Venkateshwar and David Joyce wrote in a note sent to Fortune. Despite boosting subscriber numbers, Disney inheriting Star India’s IPL rights five years ago may have contributed to Disney making a net loss in its India streaming business, they wrote.
More broadly, Disney losing out on the IPL auction may mark a turning point for foreign Big Tech companies that invested a record $35 billion into India’s startup industry last year. American tech giants Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Facebook all had expressed interest in bidding for the IPL rights, but ultimately all four companies, vexed by stock routs and a looming recession, bowed out. Amazon withdrew the week before the auction because executives thought it made little “business sense” to purchase the expensive rights, according to Bloomberg.
Some investors believe the wisest move may be to drop India from the centerpiece of any growth plans. “We believe the right course of action for Disney would be to strip India out of its long-term guidance and focus attention only on Disney+,” Venkateshwar and Joyce wrote, citing price pressure and lower earnings potential in India.
America’s tech giants remain confident that India investments can contribute to their bottom line. Just last month, Silicon Valley venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz announced a $500 million venture fund in India.
“All eyes are still on India” owing to the country’s size and growth potential, says Pathak. “But a lot of companies are looking more closely at the monetary value of their India businesses.”
