Grab your cricket bats, set up your wickets and get ready to bowl, because today we’re talking cricket! Cricket, it turns out, could explain the future of the (sports) streaming wars.
As various philosophers and historians have quipped over the years — though tracking down exactly who said it when is complicated — history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. I’d apply this to the streaming wars: what happens in different countries maybe not be the exact same, but it will rhyme.
That’s why, for this week’s column, we’re traveling halfway around the globe to talk about the big story: the Indian Premiere League, a cricket league which sold its Indian linear and streaming rights to Disney’s Hotstar and Viacom18 respectively.
(And so you know my preferences, I’d say IPL rights are at least as important to the future of streaming as say, the ouster of a major TV exec at a certain studio. But while the latter got roughly 4,500 articles and newsletters written about it, the IPL only received a handful of write-ups.)
This outcome is a pinch of a shocker, since Disney’s Hotstar had previously owned both linear and streaming rights, and now they’ve lost the streaming rights. A good chunk of Disney+’s subscribers are based in India, and those subscribers seem to watch a lot of cricket. In the company’s last earnings call in May, Disney’s CFO Christine McCarthy said 36 percent of the 137.7 million overall Disney+ subscribers were from Disney+ Hotstar, the name of Disney’s Indian streaming service. A little more than half of the subscribers who signed up for Disney+ (8 million in the last quarter) were from, yep, Disney+ Hotstar.
So let’s explain what happened, what motivated each of these companies (to either try to win or hold back), and what this could mean for U.S. and global sports rights. Viacom18 — a recently expanded traditional and streaming joint venture between Paramount Global, Bodhi Tree Systems and Reliance — won the rights for streaming of the IPL in India for a whopping $3 billion. (Disney’s Hotstar only retained broadcast rights in India for another $3 billion.) It won because it had the most to gain, whereas the bigger streamers are starting to question the value of losing money to grow streaming services in India (pre-2022, that rapid growth no matter the profits made a great fast-talking headline out of earnings calls for Wall Street).
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