IPL media auction: There's a world beyond the fanciest T20 league investors will look forward to

Indian Premier League (IPL), the International Cricket Council (ICC) and BCCI-bilateral, all at the same time. Between 2018 and 2022, Star India (Disney, now) owned the rights to all these three properties, making it the most unique cycle cricket will ever see. Going forward, no global broadcaster will find it feasible to buy more than just one of these rights packages, or at best two, given the changing dynamics.

Let’s look at the why and how of it, and impending scenarios that will be altering the ‘course of play’ going forward. In 2011, when Star India restructured and reinvented itself in the Asian markets as one of the multiple broadcast units of Fox International Channels, they arrived here with one job to do: Amplify the scale and size of their business to such gargantuan proportions that potential buyers would line up in due time, costs notwithstanding. What they had to do was step-up the jazz.

They did, starting with a swanky 37-storey building for an office in one of Mumbai’s plushest suburbs. Everything they did was eye-catching, mind-boggling. They paid US$1.98b to bag ICC rights for the 2015-23 cycle – an 80% hike from the previous deal (US dollar stood at Rs 62.33).

They paid US$2.55b to bag IPL rights for the 2018-22 cycle – a four-and-half-time jump from the previous deal (US dollar stood at Rs 67.79). They paid just under a billion dollars, Rs 6,138 crore to be precise, in 2018 (US dollar stood at Rs 70) to bag the BCCI-bilateral. All put together, Star committed approximately US$5.5b – apropos of inflation and the varying value of the dollar between 2014 and 2018 – to Indian cricket and the ICC.