On June 13, The Walt Disney Company launched the opportunity to renew its broadcast rights for Indian Premier League Cricket. Investors and analysts widely welcomed the decision, believing the rights to the most popular sport in the world’s second most populous country, which ended up selling at auction for $2.6 billion over five years, are simply too expensive given the relatively low income. per consumer. . Indian market.
But when Disney launched the rights to cricket, an excellent new competitor stepped in to win them over: Viacom18, an entertainment joint venture formed between Reliance Industries, operator of India’s largest telecommunications company, Jio; Paramount World; And Bodhi Tree Systems, an investment vehicle backed by media industry veterans James Murdoch and Uday Shankar. (Reliance Industries has 51% in the company, while Bodhi Tree Systems has 40% and Paramount Global has 9%.)
As Michael Nathansson, analyst at MoffettNathanson, wrote in the post-auction post: Indian Media.”
Viacom18 manages 38 sets of TV channels in India, produces and broadcasts Bollywood blockbusters and runs Voot, the popular AVOD and SVOD streaming service. Paramount Global offers its Hollywood TV shows and movies on Viacom18 platforms and is expected to launch Paramount+ streaming offerings soon. Bodhi Tree Systems, which raised $1.5 billion from the Qatar Investment Authority in February 2022, invested $1.8 billion in a large minority stake in Viacom18 in late April. Major shareholder Reliance Industries also invested $219 million in the company as part of the same transaction, while its popular app Jio Cinema was moved from its Telecom portfolio to Viacom’s streaming channel18.
Bodhi Tree partner Uday Shankar has also served as CEO of Disney in the Asia Pacific region (he left the company in late 2020) as well as the main chief architect currently serving Disney+ Hotstar in the India broadcast landscape. . Shankar will now become a deeply involved and hands-on strategic investor in a company that is Disney’s biggest competitive threat in the same market.
Seizing digital rights from IPL, seen as the crown jewel of sporting venues in cricket-plagued India, will be a powerful accelerator for Viacom18’s broadcast ambitions that could shake the entire industry. Regional research and consulting firm Media Partners Asia expects Disney+ Hotstar to lose more than 15 million of its 42 million subscribers when the cricket season begins.
Viacom18’s improved position has the potential to shake up the entire industry, perhaps even premium SVOD players like Netflix, which has around 5 million Indian subscribers (far from the 100 million subscribers Reid Hastings predicted the service would end up having in India). ).
But just as free streamers and AVOD games are generating renewed interest in the US, analysts in the region are more appreciative of Viacom18’s ad sales potential. “Viacom18’s opportunity could be very big due to the injection of Jio Cinema and the partnership with Reliance Jio,” said Vivek Kuto, CEO of Media Partners Asia, noting that Reliance Jio has 400 million monthly active users with its services.
Couto adds: “This is a powerful partnership for streaming startups like Viacom18, which advertisers find incredibly attractive. You can tell we have IPL and our video app is on hundreds of millions of phones and almost every connected TV in the country. Only YouTube, which now dominates online advertising in India, has benefited from this type of monetization.
The story appeared in the June 22 issue of The Gossipify. Click here to subscribe.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
