IPL Media Rights: Will BCCI Engage Streaming Giants?
The race for cricket’s next great media jackpot has already begun, even if the main player is still in the dressing room.
Last week, the ICC quietly raised the stakes by forming a five-member working group to map out its media-rights strategy for the 2028-31 cycle. Their brief is blunt: protect the current value of ICC rights, or push it higher, by finding the sharpest price-discovery model the market can offer.
But the ICC knows its place in this ecosystem. Its tender cannot move until one tournament does.
Everything waits for the IPL.
BCCI hits pause while the world waits
The global calendar is effectively frozen around one document: the next IPL media-rights tender. Only after the BCCI shows its hand will every other cricket property, including the ICC’s, come up for serious bidding.
For now, though, the BCCI hasn’t even decided whether to bring in a financial advisory firm to shape that tender, as it did last time. For an organisation often described as a sleeping giant, this is one of those moments when everyone is watching to see when it finally stirs.
There’s an intriguing overlap too. BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia sits on the ICC’s media-rights working group, chaired by ECB chief Richard Thompson and including ICC chairman Jay Shah. The same people helping design the ICC’s future are directly tied to the IPL’s.
That only sharpens the spotlight on what the BCCI does next.
The template that changed everything
The last IPL rights cycle in 2022 offered a glimpse of what smart structuring can do. Back then, the BCCI hired KPMG to help draft a tender that broke from tradition.
The standout innovation: a special, non-exclusive digital package for the Indian subcontinent. It carved out a select “bouquet” of 18 high-value matches per season from a 74-game schedule and sold them separately.
That small slice of the calendar exploded in value.
The package alone climbed to Rs 3,273 crore, at Rs 33.24 crore per game. It also triggered a historic shift: for the first time, internet rights in the Indian subcontinent generated more revenue for the BCCI than traditional TV rights.
That was not a tweak. It was a signal.
Streaming models and missed conversations
Executives across the sports industry expected the BCCI to build on that momentum.
“We were expecting to hear something from them (BCCI) on this. Given the way tech is changing how we consume sport, we thought the board would be keen to explore these changing revenue patterns and models for IPL. Look at the YouTube sports-bundling model in the US, for instance. The NFL Sunday Ticket is a case study in itself,” an industry executive said.
The message is clear: the template exists, the technology is ready, and the appetite for premium sport behind flexible digital models is proven.
Those inside the business believe the BCCI is sitting on enormous untapped value if it chooses to explore this space in depth.
AGM in Mumbai, agenda in bold
BCCI members gather in Mumbai from Friday for the AGM. On paper, there will be multiple items to discuss. In reality, everyone tracking developments sees one subject towering over the rest: the upcoming sale of IPL media rights.
“India has a strong cricket platform. The IPL is already a premium property on that platform. All you need to build on it is effectively what can be done outside of the live match feed. Archives, highlights, documentaries, regional storytelling, fan engagement etc. You may have one or two broadcasters in the race for rights but building a separate non-live consumer base to monetise premium properties selectively is another subject matter altogether,” the executive added.
That’s the second layer of the rights game. Not just who shows the match, but who owns the story around it — the clips, the history, the language feeds, the fan hooks that keep people locked in all year.
One basket, too many eggs
Right now, the IPL leans heavily on a single broadcast partner.
“Perhaps not a very healthy model either, considering all your eggs happen to be in one single basket,” an IPL franchise executive said, pointing to the tournament’s dependence on JioStar for live broadcasts.
The alternative? A modular approach. Different rights carved out for different players. Live, non-live, regional, archival, fan-engagement products — each treated as a separate premium asset instead of being bundled into one monolithic deal.
That’s where the global streaming giants come into the conversation.
Netflix has stayed away from putting live sport behind its paywall in any major way. Yet it has consistently chased live-adjacent events and sports-related content that keep subscribers from drifting away. Amazon and YouTube have already tested and scaled sports models in other markets.
So why haven’t they dived into India’s biggest cricket property?
The onus shifts to BCCI
“We keep wondering why an Amazon or a Netflix or a YouTube hasn’t looked at the India market. Well, the fact is, the onus lies on us to market our products to them and only then can we catch their attention. So, in the case of IPL rights, the onus certainly lies on the BCCI to go out and start talking to these platforms,” the franchise executive added.
That’s the crux of the next IPL cycle.
The money is out there. The technology is mature. The global case studies exist. The ICC is already reorganising itself to protect its own future value.
All eyes now turn to the BCCI’s next move: will it simply sell another blockbuster rights package, or will it redraw the map of how cricket is bought, sold, and watched in the world’s biggest market?
