Basil
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The BCCI rights will be coming up early next year. With the high price you guys paid for the IPL rights, will Star bid with the same intensity to renew them?
It’s too soon for us to figure out whether we want to bid for BCCI or not. If we didn’t win the IPL rights then we had no choice. Now that we have it, the desperation is not so strong. Between the ICC and IPL, we still have a strong portfolio, especially because most of the ICC tournaments come before or after the IPL.
Contrary to what everybody thinks and says, for us the IPL rights were not very expensive. For our internal benchmark, we compare it with the price we were paying for the BCCI rights, which is 43 crore. You are paying 43 crores for a Test and that too not for select Tests against Australia and England. And you have to pay 10 crores more and get an IPL right. It’s a no-brainer.
In your pursuit of monopolising Indian cricket, wouldn’t you like to have BCCI rights in your kitty too just to kill the competition?
We are in the business of making money. I’m not an owner. I work for a shareholders’ board, investors, everybody. I have to deliver returns on investment. There is only so much one guy can afford. Say someone has IPL, BCCI and ICC, there’s still plenty of cricket outside of those.
Read the entire interview here
We would kill each other to bid for Test cricket rights if everybody was watching it, says Star India CEO Uday Shankar
It’s too soon for us to figure out whether we want to bid for BCCI or not. If we didn’t win the IPL rights then we had no choice. Now that we have it, the desperation is not so strong. Between the ICC and IPL, we still have a strong portfolio, especially because most of the ICC tournaments come before or after the IPL.
Contrary to what everybody thinks and says, for us the IPL rights were not very expensive. For our internal benchmark, we compare it with the price we were paying for the BCCI rights, which is 43 crore. You are paying 43 crores for a Test and that too not for select Tests against Australia and England. And you have to pay 10 crores more and get an IPL right. It’s a no-brainer.
In your pursuit of monopolising Indian cricket, wouldn’t you like to have BCCI rights in your kitty too just to kill the competition?
We are in the business of making money. I’m not an owner. I work for a shareholders’ board, investors, everybody. I have to deliver returns on investment. There is only so much one guy can afford. Say someone has IPL, BCCI and ICC, there’s still plenty of cricket outside of those.
Read the entire interview here
We would kill each other to bid for Test cricket rights if everybody was watching it, says Star India CEO Uday Shankar
