IPL 2018: Star India Records the Maximum Revenue in Tournament's History

Indian Premier League’s (IPL) new broadcaster Star India has scaled new sky-high revenue in this eleventh edition. With the IPL final to be staged on Sunday (May 27), Star India is expecting its ad revenue to be approximately 20 billion rupees ($300 million).

Interestingly, this amount is more than 50 percent of previous year revenue of 13 billion rupees that was achieved by former broadcaster Sony Pictures Network (SPN).

Meanwhile, Star had paid a staggering amount of 163.48 billion rupees ($2.4 billion) – to claim the television and digital rights of the IPL. This huge amount was paid by the Star Network for the period of five years.

Thus, the broadcasters are well on their way to make more revenue from the IPL, this edition.

This is a Gargantuan Amount:

Furthermore, Star will also make more money from distribution and transfer of rights.

Moreover, they will pull in more viewers by other programming techniques.

Star India Director Sanjay Gupta said that the IPL is a bigger platform than they thought.

“When we took it over we thought it is the biggest tournament. But as we have gone through it we have realised it is even bigger than we thought it was… in its scale, in its depth, in the followership that you get,” said  Gupta as quoted by Reuters.

According to BARC rating, there is a jump of 14 percent in the Television viewership for the first 52 matches of the season.

Consequently, this year viewership will easily leapfrog previous season viewership of 1.29 billion of the last year (2017).

Meanwhile, the brand value of the IPL grew to $5.3 billion in 2017 according to New York-based firm Duff and Phelps.

Furthermore, the first qualifier between the Chennai Super Kings and Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) set a new global record. There were 8.26 million concurrent viewers on Star’s video streaming platform, Hotstar which is the highest-ever for a live event.

Meanwhile, according to BARC, last year, the overall viewership for the final between MI and RPS reached 39.4 million. This year it would be more for the final between Chennai Super Kings and Sunrisers Hyderabad.

A total of 125 brands have joined hands with the IPL due to which Star Networks makes tonnes of money.