IPL Media-Rights Auction Stalls as BCCI Deliberates Next Move

The next great auction in world cricket is on the horizon, but the room is strangely quiet.

Last week, the ICC fired its opening shot by naming a five-member working group to shape its media-rights strategy for the 2028-31 cycle. The brief is blunt: protect the current value of ICC rights or push it higher, and find the smartest possible way to discover that price in a market changing faster than ever.

Yet the ICC cannot move first. It has to wait.

Nothing serious goes to market until the BCCI unveils its blueprint for the next IPL media-rights tender. Only after the world’s most powerful T20 league sets its numbers and structure will every other cricket property, including the ICC’s own portfolio, truly know where it stands.

Right now, that starting gun has not been fired.

A sleeping giant hesitates

The BCCI, often described as a sleeping giant that only stirs when it chooses to, has not yet decided whether to bring in a financial advisory agency to design the next tender and its price-discovery model. That was the route taken in 2022, when KPMG was roped in to draft a tender that changed the economics of cricket broadcasting.

The 2022 document introduced a non-exclusive digital package in the Indian subcontinent – a curated bouquet of 18 high-value matches per season in a 74-game structure. It was a bold carve-out. It fetched Rs 3,273 crore at Rs 33.24 crore per match and, crucially, flipped a long-standing hierarchy: for the first time, internet rights from the subcontinent generated more revenue for the BCCI than traditional TV rights.

That move didn’t just raise money. It sent a signal that IPL rights could be sliced, packaged and sold with far more imagination than a simple TV-versus-digital split.

ICC eyes, BCCI hands

The cross-pollination at the top only adds intrigue. BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia sits on the ICC media-rights working group, chaired by ECB chief Richard Thompson and including ICC chairman Jay Shah. The same ecosystem that will decide how the IPL is sold will also help shape how global cricket is priced.

Industry executives have been waiting for signs of movement from the Indian board.

“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,” said one executive tracking developments.

The message from the market is clear: the upside is huge if the BCCI is prepared to dig deeper into new formats and new audiences.

Beyond the live feed

The timing could hardly be more sensitive. BCCI members gather in Mumbai from Friday for the AGM, and those watching the board closely cannot see a more pressing commercial topic than the upcoming media-rights sale.

India already owns the strongest cricket platform on the planet. The IPL sits at the top of that pile as a premium, appointment-viewing product. The next leap may not come from the live game alone.

“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.

This is where the structure of the tender becomes critical. The current “all-inclusive” approach, where one dominant live broadcaster carries the league, is starting to look exposed in a market where consumption is fragmenting.

One basket, too many eggs

“Perhaps not a very healthy model either, considering all your eggs happen to be in one single basket,” an IPL franchise executive observed, pointing to the league’s heavy dependence on JioStar for live broadcasts.

The concern is not about the present – IPL remains a ratings juggernaut – but about resilience. If one platform controls too much of the live ecosystem, the league’s ability to experiment, to court new audiences, and to withstand shocks shrinks.

Executives pushing for change speak of a “modular” approach to rights: carve out pieces, test new products, build parallel consumer bases around non-live content, and avoid locking everything into a single, monolithic deal.

The streaming giants on the sidelines

OTT heavyweight Netflix has so far stayed away from putting live sport behind its paywall in any meaningful way. Yet it has consistently explored events that fit within its existing subscription model, using sport-adjacent content to keep people hooked.

That creates an obvious question inside Indian cricket circles: where are the global tech platforms in this conversation?

“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 said.

The ball, once again, sits firmly in the BCCI’s court. How aggressively it chooses to play this next over will not just shape the future of the IPL, but set the tone for how the entire cricket economy is valued in the next decade.