NEW DELHI: Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s company will stream Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket games for free, as per people familiar with the matter, using its exclusive rights to one of the world’s most-watched sporting events to challenge Walt Disney Co. and Amazon.com Inc. in India’s booming media market.

In order to defeat rivals Disney and Sony Group Corp., Viacom18 Media Ltd., a joint venture between Paramount Worldwide and Anil Ambani's company Reliance Industries Ltd., secured the IPL streaming rights for USD 2.7 billion last year. Before, Disney held those rights and made use of them to attract users to its Disney Hotstar streaming service.

Viacom18 is taking a different approach, offering the games to as many people as possible so as to generate advertising sales, said the people, who declined to be identified because the move hasn’t been announced publicly. 
Free media platforms like Google and Facebook are much more popular than for-profit premium services like Netflix and produce billions of dollars in advertising revenue for the nation.

Viacom18 officials have predicted that an audience in excess of 550 million will watch the weeks-long IPL games, which will help the conglomerate’s technology and internet goals, spanning from online retail to entertainment. The series of contests for this year will begin on March 31 and stretch for over eight weeks, with each match lasting only around three hours. Users will be able to watch any number of games for any amount of time on any internet-connected device thanks to Viacom18.

Reliance has a well-known game plan because it provided mobile service at pricing significantly lower than the competition, attracting hundreds of millions of subscribers and driving competitors out of business. Reliance Jio, the nation's largest telecom operator by market share with close to 500 million subscribers, is owned by Ambani's conglomerate. The five-year IPL contract gives it a unique opportunity to profit from a competition known as the Super Bowl of cricket.

Last year, the price of cricket rights increased as more media companies competed for them to expand their fledgling streaming businesses. India's use of the internet is accelerating rapidly, and both domestic and international media behemoths regard India as a catalyst for growing their subscriber numbers. Disney, which had previously held the IPL streaming rights, was outbid by Sony in that auction but won the TV broadcast rights. After finishing the original auction paperwork, Amazon, another bidder, withdrew from the competition in the final hour.

Ambani secured the sale by shelling out over three times what Disney had in the prior agreement. Disney then spent an additional $3 billion to purchase the standard TV package. Ambani made a joint bid for the IPL rights with Paramount, James Murdoch, a media mogul, and Uday Shankar, the former CEO of Hotstar.
 

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