ESPN-STAR Score BIG

Less than a week after the ESPN-STAR group won the rights to host the inaugural edition of the Twenty20 Champions Cricket League to be held in India from December 3 to the Tenth, a clearer picture has emerged in the sub-continent. The business side of cricket continues to prosper, the BCCI continues to get richer and most importantly, the ESPN-STAR group have become without doubt the most dominating sports broadcasting entity in this part of the world and now provide sports content for over a sixth of the world’s population.

After having been consistently outbid and outplayed by other groups for the broadcast of cricket content, the top brass of ESPN-STAR have struck back with a vengeance. The rights to broadcast the previous two Cricket World Cups were taken from right under the noses of the ESPN-STAR group by SONY and things for the broadcasting giant have changed significantly since.

For once they found themselves relying on Sports other than Cricket to bring in viewers.They found success with F1 and Football but the big cricket fish was what they wanted.ESPN-STAR were not totally isolated in this regard. They were granted rights which they still hold to broadcast tours of the Indian cricket team to most countries outside the sub-continent like England, South Africa and Australia.

Meanwhile, the bigger revenue cash cow of India’s cricket in India went to the Nimbus group. The same time also saw ESPN-STAR lose the rights to broadcast Indian cricket in Sri Lanka and Pakistan to the Dubai based Ten Sports.

What they were left with since were long periods of time without Indian cricket but things changed at around this time last year when the first ever ICC Twenty 20 world cup in South Africa was held. The blockbuster success of this tournament helped by the Indian team winning and a new hysteria of the ever loving Indian cricket fan started the registers rolling in for the group.

Since then one thing has been made crystal clear and has motivated their future actions. No matter how much cricketing content they might show on their channel, apart from the strictest follower of the sport; the die-hard Indian cricket fan is simply not interested because if India doesn’t play, India doesn’t watch.

The realization of this fact finally led the group to start an independent 24 hour cricket channel ‘Star Cricket’ solely dedicated to capitalize on India’s frenzied following of the sport.

The recent months have been extremely fruitful to ESPN-STAR. They have acquired rights to broadcast all official ICC cricketing content for the next seven years till 2015.This includes 2 World Cups, The Champions Trophy and the T20 World Cups. Add to this the existing rights to selected overseas tours of the Indian team, a renewed contract to broadcast the F1 races for the next five years, the English Premier League (Football) And The Spanish League, Hockey tournaments and the rights to broadcast the 2012 London Olympics in the Asian region,ESPN-STAR stands to make a ton of money.

With the success of the Indian Premier League,ESPN-STAR have now successfully captured the right to broadcast the Champions T20 for a period of Ten years, going ahead and paying close to a Billion Dollars making this amount the highest ever on a per game basis  in the history of cricket.

But, with over a decade of broadcasting experience and a true understanding of the Country’s cricket obsession; they will consider this to be money well spent.