Women's IPL: The next big thing for the BCCI?

Board of Control for Cricket in India is the sport's governing body and conducts the wildly-popular men's edition of IPL, broadcast rights for which are set to be fought over by media giants including The Walt Disney Co. and Amazon.com Inc. The BCCI wants to auction broadcast rights for the women-only games and its six league teams by early next year, its head Jay Shah told Bloomberg News in an interview in Mumbai.

"At the moment, there is strong interest in media rights," Shah said, adding that he was hopeful the owners of men's IPL franchises would bid for women's league teams too. The association, he said, wants to bolster the women's game as it's typically overlooked in the otherwise cricket-crazy nation of almost 1.4 billion people. Shah's game plan to bolster diversity is also underpinned by business savvy as he looks for more niche ways to monetize the 15-year-old sports franchise.

IPL, estimated to be worth $7 billion, attracted 600 million viewers last year and trails only the Premier League and the National Football League in terms of viewership, according to BCCI estimates. An auction of broadcast rights for the men's league in June is likely to draw bids of more than $5 billion in a heated contest that could include Amazon Prime Video, Walt Disney, Sony Group Corp. and Reliance Industries Ltd., led by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani.

As long as cricket continues to be played in the allies of India, IPL's popularity will keep increasing, according to Utkarsh Sinha, managing director at Bexley Advisors in Mumbai. "IPL is one of the stickiest media properties available, and heavyweights will slug it out to get media rights to it," Sinha said. "It is probably the first format globally designed with commercials