The International Cricket Council (ICC) might be witnessing a dip in their next media rights package in India, as the Indian Cricket Team saw an early exit in the T20 World Cup this year. As per several reports, ICC saw a downfall in the Indian viewers in the recently concluded T20 World Cup, as compared to the 2016 T20 World Cup.
According to the official broadcaster of the T20 World Cup, Disney+ Hotstar, they have also stated the same after seeing a drop from 293 million to 283 million compared between the 2016 and 2021 T20 World Cup respectively. The reason for this downfall in the viewership is credited to team India’s early exit in the T20 World Cup.
As per Economic Times, Disney+ Hotstar had pre-sold their entire ad inventory on TV and digital for over ₹1,200 crores, while in 2016 it was only valued at 370 corers. Apart from that, the advertisers paid almost four times more this year, as they went to spend 9-10 lakhs rupees per ten-second spot.
The advertisers have been affected due to India’s early exit from the ICC tournament. Following which the whole economic cycle of broadcasting would be seeing a dip in near future.
“The viewership of the final was decent at 6.09 TVR (male 15+ AB), but the overall tournament viewership was much lower than expected. This will directly impact the monetisation of the next ICC properties,” said a top executive of a media buying agency.
ICC’s current media rights cycle will come to an end in 2023, for which the Star India Network paid almost 1.98 billion dollars to secure the rights. But later on, the deal saw an uprise after some revaluation and the addition of new properties, which took the sum to 2.02 million. But this big money spending has been labelled unprofitable by a former Star executive.
The international cricket governing board had plans to launch a bidding process for the next cycle, 2024-2031, in November, as they were looking to close a deal soon despite the current holders have still one year left. But recent reports suggest that the plans have been delayed and the process will start between March and May next year. While the ICC is open to breaking the rights into two halves of four years each and selling them separately to the Indian market.