The ICC media rights, after weeks of speculations, were finally sold yesterday for the Indian territory and Cricbuzz has reported that the rights have gone to Disney (Star Sports) at a humongous value of 3.125 billion USD for 4 years.
This is the first time that ICC is selling the rights for different territories. When the rights were last sold in 2015, they were sold universally and Star Sports had bought it at that time as well, for 2.5 billion USD. However, the difference in the 2015 broadcast deal was that the rights were bought for a period of 8 years and not 4 years.
The valuation of the current ICC deal has been surprising for some people as ICC was asking for 1.5 billion USD for a 4-year deal and approximately 4.2 billion USD for an 8-year deal. ICC had made it clear that a multiplier of 2.8 would be applied to compare the value of 4-year offers with 8-year offers, if there were any.
To match the value of Disney’s 4-year offer of 3 billion USD, an 8-year offer of approxiomately 8.4 billion USD had to be made for ICC to consider it. ICC might have opted for an e-auction if the valuation of the two offers were separated by a margin of 10% or less. But, neither of it was the case and the offer made by Disney (Star Sports) was head and shoulders above the rest.
The Disney-Hotstar bid for the #ICC rights is astonishing on many counts. For one, nobody had estimated it would breach the 3b USD mark, people are rubbing their eyes in disbelief. This is the best news that ICC member countries could have received. (1/n)
— Harsha Bhogle (@bhogleharsha) August 28, 2022
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Disney (Star Sports) were in danger of losing digital subscribers in India
The reason why Disney had to break the bank to buy the ICC rights was because they had the IPL digital rights for the last 5 years and they were also the owners of ICC rights since 2015, because of which they had gained a lot of subscribers for their OTT app Hotstar in India.
Disney were in danger of losing a huge portion of their Hotstar subscribers because they recently lost the IPL digital rights to Viacom in the IPL e-auction. However, now that they have grabbed the ICC rights again, there is a chance that a lot of Indian fans will renew their Hotstar subscriptions.
