Mukesh Ambani has paid $2.7 billion to stream Indian Premier League games for free in 2023.

Beating out competitors Disney and Sony Group Corp. Previously, Disney owned those rights and used them to attract subscribers to its streaming service, Disney+ Hotstar.
According to the people who declined to be identified because the move has not been publicly announced, Viacom18 is taking a different approach, offering the games to as many people as possible in order to generate advertising sales. In the country, free media services such as Google and Facebook generate billions of dollars in advertising sales and have fared far better than paid premium products such as Netflix.
Executives at Viacom18 estimate that more than 550 million people will watch the weeks-long IPL games, which will boost the conglomerate’s technology and internet ambitions, which range from online retail to entertainment.
This year’s series of matches, each lasting only three hours, will begin on March 31 and will last nearly eight weeks. Viacom18 will allow users to watch an unlimited number of games for an unlimited amount of time on any internet-connected device.
It’s a familiar strategy for Reliance, which has offered mobile service at significantly lower prices than competitors, attracting hundreds of millions of customers and driving competitors out of business. Ambani’s conglomerate owns Reliance Jio, the country’s largest telecom operator by market share, which is approaching 500,000 subscribers. The five-year IPL contract gives it unparalleled reach to capitalize on a tournament described as the Super Bowl of cricket.
Cricket rights prices skyrocketed last year as several media companies sought them to bolster their fledgling streaming businesses. Internet adoption is accelerating in India, and global and domestic media conglomerates see the country as a catalyst for increasing their subscriber bases.
Disney, which previously owned the IPL streaming rights, lost the auction but won the TV broadcast rights by outbidding Sony. Amazon, another bidder, withdrew from the auction at the last minute after completing the initial auction paperwork.
Ambani won by paying nearly three times what Disney had previously paid. In turn, Disney paid even more u2014 approximately $3 billion u2014 for the traditional TV package. Ambani bid for the IPL rights alongside Paramount, billionaire James Murdoch, and former Hotstar CEO Uday Shankar.