Cricket boards are pricing out their biggest market
“Cricket is at a crossroads,” says Uday Shankar.
As vice chairman of JioStar – the giant Indian platform that serves more than 500 million viewers, spends around $3.9 billion a year on content and was built largely on the back of cricket rights – he does not speak as a neutral observer. The 2022 Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament auction saw the value of rights rise to $6.2 billion, a per-match valuation of $15 million globally, second only to the NFL. The boards brilliantly played a competitive dynamic to get there. The problem, Shankar says, is that the buyer universe has shrunk dramatically since then, and those still competing are doing the math. “Why would you really expect JioStar to pay the same value for a match between India and Afghanistan, India and Bangladesh, or India and Sri Lanka as I pay for a match between India and England or India and Australia?” he says. The answer, as far as he is concerned, is that they shouldn’t – and until the administrators of cricket worldwide take that into account, the sport risks pricing itself out of the primary market that funds it.
“JioStar is the goose that lays golden eggs,” he says. “Now they have to decide whether to kill the goose or keep it [it] lay eggs.” He describes an active internal investigation at JioStar into how much further the company can push the sport. The Future Tours Programme, the planning framework for cricket, is causing particular impatience. It almost looks, he says, as if it was designed when the East India Company still ruled the world.
He is not predicting a strike. He warns with a specific commercial logic. “There are sensible people in cricket administration,” he admits. “But the entire group of executives worldwide needs to come together because India – and within India one or two media companies – are so fundamental to the future of cricket.”
The market seems to be catching up with his argument. With the current rights cycle ending in 2027 and a new auction expected before the 2028 season, analysts at Media Partners Asia are already predicting the next cycle to remain stable at around $5.4 billion. This is equivalent in face value to the current deal at current exchange rates compared to 2022, but represents a drop of 13% per match as the expanded fixture schedule dilutes the value of individual games. With the merger of Viacom18 and Disney’s Indian operations removing the main source of competitive tension from the previous auction, the dynamics that drove the 2022 price increase are unlikely to be repeated.
The person saying this is not a media manager who ended up in cricket. He is, at heart, a journalist – someone who has built a career on going places others wouldn’t, on asking questions others wouldn’t have thought to ask, and on looking at an India that preferred to keep most of its industry at arm’s length.
He was a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi in the early 1980s, left-leaning, campus active, convinced he could change the country through politics. Then something clicked. “I realized just in time that you don’t change anything in politics,” he says Variety. “Politics changes you.” Instead, he became a journalist and consciously chose to go to Patna in the midst of Bihar’s turmoil – the fallout from the Mandal Commission, caste wars, far-left unrest – while his colleagues chased reports in the Economic Times and the Times of India in Mumbai and Delhi.
The television obsession came from a single moment. In 1991, he caught Gulf War coverage from a friend on CNN – access that, at the time, required a huge satellite dish and a lot of luck. In a country where literacy was limited and newspaper penetration was low, he immediately understood that television would become the most powerful tool India had ever seen to reach people. He left his job at the Center for Science and Environment, where he had been part of the team that launched the environmental publication ‘Down to Earth’ and edited a citizens’ report on the state of India’s environment, and planned to make it on television.
Several years of struggle followed. He worked as a freelancer – small news packages, current affairs programmes, executive producer credits for programs anchored by Karan Thapar. He went on job interviews at news stations, most of which no longer exist. At one point, the woman who interviewed him delivered her verdict at the end of the session: He didn’t have what it took to succeed on television, and her advice was to go back to print. “I came back discouraged,” he says. “But I think this is the kind of thing that just strengthened my resolve.”
The breakthrough came when Aroon Purie decided to launch news channel Aaj Tak and took a chance on Shankar despite his limited live news background. “The credit goes to Aroon Purie,” says Shankar. “It worked great for me.”
Then came the Murdochs’ Star India. By the time he arrived, the network was successful but stagnant: strong in Hindi-language entertainment and catering almost exclusively to the urban middle class. He had an early conversation with Rupert and James Murdoch that confirmed his instincts. He asked them why, when everyone else was looking across Asia, they had decided to double down on India. Rupert’s response: “The power of a billion people and a democracy. How wrong can you go?” Shankar saw the same thing. His response was a burst of regional expansion – in Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu – that rewired the logic of Indian television. He launched a Kabaddi League at a time when virtually no one believed in it; a friend told him he had become too arrogant, that no one would watch. About 450 to 500 million people now watch the sport.
“The pursuit of a better life for themselves and their next generation was universal,” he says. “It wasn’t just limited to the middle class.”
Outside of cricket, Bodhi Tree – the investment platform he co-founded with James Murdoch in 2022, backed in part by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund – has poured significant capital into media and education, the latter through the Allen Career Institute, a company that prepares around 400,000 students a year for India’s brutally competitive engineering and medicine entrance exams. “People from small villages of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh who went to a school where the science teacher didn’t know physics, the math teacher didn’t know math — these people were able to qualify for medicine and engineering because of the support of companies like Allen,” he says. Bodhi Tree’s thesis is to digitize and further expand that access.
A conversation with Shankar about Bollywood becomes sharp. The success of “Dhurandhar” – the spy thriller produced by Jio Studios that has become one of Bollywood’s biggest recent hits – is based on Shankar’s sharp diagnosis of what ails the industry. He attributes the film’s success not to any systemic improvement in Bollywood, but to the fact that the film was made by people outside the usual circle. In contrast, the same talent insularity that has held back Hindi-language cinema has been avoided by cricket. “Cricket, for all its problems, has done one brilliant thing: it has opened the talent gate far and wide,” says Shankar. He calls on pacer Akash Deep, who grew up in a village in south Bihar without a road, let alone a cricket field, but ended up playing for India. Until Bollywood expands beyond its familiar bubble of writers, directors and actors, Shankar argues, it will continue to lose its audience to the Tamil, Telugu and Kannada industries that have already done so. “The viewers of cinema have far preceded the makers of cinema,” he says. “That is the big crisis.”
On the distribution front, he offers stark numbers: there are now more active TV sets in India than the number of pay-TV households. The transition has arrived. He doesn’t lose sleep over it, because in his view the method of delivery is much less important than the quality of the intellectual property. What does matter is the part of the deck that no one has touched: monetization. Streaming runs on the same two-legged model – advertising and subscriptions – that newspapers invented more than a century ago. “Media companies have done a great job in content innovation,” he says. “But innovation in the monetization model has been completely absent.” AI is entering the picture not as a threat to creative work, but as a tool to produce content at a lower unit cost and generate the data that could unlock new revenue streams.
He completely rejects the “media company” label because of what JioStar has become. Technology and creativity, he emphasizes, are the only fair description. And yet the man who made that argument spent his formative years archiving drought-stricken villages and floodplains—and, by his own admission, has never stopped thinking like a reporter. “The value I add is that I ask the questions,” he says. “People spend too much time giving answers and not enough time asking the right questions. I have remained a journalist through and through.”
After all, it was business that saved him from politics.
