Star wins Indian cricket media rights

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Star group has won the BCCI media rights for the next six years, board president N Srinivasan announced yesterday.

The winning bid was Rs 3851 crore and covers the BCCI’s broadcast and Internet rights for the period July 2012-March 2018, Srinivasan said at a press conference in Chennai. “The Star group will cover 96 international matches in the period at an average of Rs 40 crore per match as against Rs 32 crore that was being received from Nimbus,” he added.

Five parties - ESPN, Star, Multi-Screen Media (MSM), Bennett & Coleman and Zee - had picked up the bid doucments. The second highest bid of Rs 3400 crore came from Sony.

Bennett & Coleman had recently won the four-year IPL internet and mobile rights for Rs 2.616 billion ($58 million).

The need to float the television mobile-internet tenders arose after the BCCI, on December 12 last year, scrapped the existing contract of Nimbus after the company repeatedly defaulted on payments.

Nimbus was allotted the four-year contract (April 1, 2010-March 31, 2014) and was paying Rs 31.25 crore for every Test/ODI/Twenty20 International played in the country