Star Sports, Disney Star’s sports broadcasting arm, and Jio Cinema, the live sports destination from Viacom18, have come up with an aggressive programming strategy for the player’s auction. Star Sports and Jio Cinema are the official TV and digital rights partners for the IPL.
The two networks have also onboarded advertisers for the auction, which will see a total of 405 cricketers going under the hammer. The 10 IPL franchises have a salary cap of Rs 206.5 crore available for filling 87 slots of which 30 slots are reserved for overseas players. This is the first time, the IPL TV and digital rights have been acquired by two different players. Disney Star bagged the TV rights for a sum of Rs 23,575 crore while Viacom18 paid Rs 23,758 crore to acquire the digital rights.
Disney Star head of Sports Sanjog Gupta said that the network launched its build-up programming for the IPL auction last week. “About 18.6 million people have already tuned in to watch our build-up programming for the IPL auction till 16th December,” he said.
Gupta added that the programming around the last IPL mini-auction in 2021 attracted 34.5 million viewers. “We will surpass that number in 2022,” he asserted.
Star Sports has roped in Tom Moody, Aaron Finch and Ian Bishop to decode the auction. The broadcaster will air the auction in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. It also ran the ‘IPL Election Se Selection 6.0’ engagement activity between 13-20 December.
