IPL media rights: Can Amazon be among the prime contenders?

The bridge is in the way of the superyacht and therefore must be dismantled. What does it have to do with the Indian Premier League (IPL) media rights auction? Nothing. Inconsequential to the IPL, the superyacht is being built for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, costs US$500m and has its own helipad. He may even pay for the reconstruction of the bridge. Now cut to the IPL. Can Bezos shell out a few billion dollars to buy the Indian Premier League (IPL) broadcast rights for Amazon’s OTT platform, Prime? Such questions don’t befit the man and his company’s profile, subject to him and his company making up their minds.

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Five years after the Indian Premier League (IPL) last raised big-bucks and escalated from being cricket's most prized property to becoming one of the world's hottest sporting leagues, it is time for T20's greatest road show to stamp its authority once again.

“The question is not whether Amazon has the money to submit a winning bid for IPL rights. The question is, do they find value?” says a top industry executive tracking IPL-related developments. “Because, if they do, there’s no stopping them”. In the year 2020, when the world was busy getting ready to fight Covid and bending the curve, Amazon’s long-held interests in cricket, solely from a content perspective, were quietly turning a circle. For a company that had first decided to study the IPL media rights tender closely in 2016, it had taken them a good four years to dip their little toe in the cricketing waters. In 2020, Amazon went and bought rights to cricket in New Zealand. It created the necessary ripple in the waters and ever since, the cricket industry in the