As Facebook gets serious about video, the social giant's ambitions for live streaming were on display on Monday in India where it put a bid north of $600 million to win the digital streaming rights of IPL[1], one of the most popular cricket tournaments in the country.
Facebook[2], which has explored several partnerships with sport giants for live streaming in the recent months, made the highest bid of Rs. 3,900 crore (roughly $610 million) for the digital rights for streaming IPL within India for a period of five years. However, it lost the auction to Star India, which won worldwide digital and TV rights with a bid of Rs. 16,347.50 crore (roughly $2.5 billion), superseding all bids for individual markets, including that of Facebook.
"It certainly seems like the biggest single bet Facebook has made on video content, which reflects how hard it is to find really popular new sports content out there," Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research told Gadgets 360. "Here in the US there are very few new rights available for the most popular sports until about 2021. So if Facebook is serious about sports content it's got to find it elsewhere. And given how many of Facebook's users are in India and other countries where cricket is popular, that's a logical place to spend the money."
Star India[3], the only company to bid for all the categories -- digital, TV etc -- made a bid of $2.5 billion, and swept the auction. Star owns popular streaming service Hotstar[4] which competes with Netflix[5] and Amazon Prime Video[6] in India and has the rights to stream HBO[7] content like Game of Thrones.
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