We’ve seen Facebook amass a rather diverse inventory of live sports. Whether it’s a weekly MLB game, UEFA Champions League fixtures, MLS matches, or college football, the social media giant has collected a large library of games. But one interesting development came up recently and it gave a lot of food for thought to many analysts. Facebook recently bid $600 million for streaming rights to the Indian Premier League cricket matches.
Eventually, Rupert Murdoch’s Star Sports won the bid for TV and streaming rights over Sony for a total of $2.6 billion. While the Facebook bid was tiny compared to Star, it showed that the company was willing to pay a price for live sports.
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The Indian Premier League tweeted a summary of the bidders and Facebook was the only tech company to bid on the rights while Disney’s BAMTech appeared to pass:
Summary – @starindia wins @Vivo_India #IPLMediaRights Invitation to Tender for INR 16,347.50 Crore (US $2.55 billion) pic.twitter.com/WSKyYh9xeF
— IndianPremierLeague (@IPL) September 5, 2017
In an interesting move, the IPL actually livestreamed the media rights bidding process. Imagine if the NFL decided to do that!
We’ve seen Twitter and Amazon take the plunge for Thursday Night Football and Verizon spend big money for one NFL game in this season’s Week 3. Verizon also has the contract for NFL mobile rights that ends after this season. It’s worth $1 billion and perhaps that’s a target for Facebook that would allow it to get in with the NFL before the big media rights deals expire in the early 2020’s.
The bid for cricket may not make big news here in the United States, but among the U.S. sports leagues looking for new money, Facebook’s offer may have made them stand up and notice.
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