Indian Company Nimbus Bags Worldwide Digital Rights For English Premier League
Nimbus Sports, an Indian sports broadcaster, has been awarded internet and mobile rights for the English Premier League (EPL) for over 80 countries till 2010. The deal covers 1140 EPL matches. As per Digvijay Singh, CEO of Nimbus Sport, this is the first time that the EPL has sold Internet rights separately from broadcast. He adds that Nimbus has closed deals with licensees in Italy, Japan, China, Korea, Australia and Hong Kong, among others. Nimbus will market these rights in conjunction with PA SportEV -a subsidiary of UK-based PA Sport. [via release]
ET reports that Nimbus expects revenues of $50 million from the deal, which sounds a bit low if you account all the countries and multi-year. Also, I wonder how this effects the ESPN-Star Sports joint venture, which has broadcasting rights in Asia, and also has sports updates on the mobile (Mobile ESPN).
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Comments (0)
Aug 13, 2007 7:17 AM
that day isnt far when companies would be scrambling for mobile and internet rights for India Cricket Series…imagine the kind of monies at stake for all cricket score revenues on mobile since all the operators look forward to driving their VAS revenues during a high profile india cricket series….and now with India playing Pakistan in Nov-Dec…BCCI might just take that route and fill up its coffers even more.
Aug 13, 2007 7:25 AM
This is some deal..
alltough i dont think EPL will do that well in terms of mobile content in india.
However with indian VAS companies entering the African and latin american markets, EPL mobile rights would be great to anyone’s kitty to pitch in for other software solutions / apps.
Aug 14, 2007 1:06 AM
Nimbus should focus on building a business with these rights. However, i believe they will just unbundle and sell them to individual markets. Internet rights will be acquired by a Yahoo or similar such global player keen on expanding in Europe, SE Asia and Africa.
Mobile rights will be sold to individual countries operators who will use this to try and shake up the market.
However, if you want to buy these rights, you must buy all the way upto 2010. dont buy small chunks or you will loose money, invest in building the market and then nimbus will sell the rights at a higher price next time around.
Best of luck to whoever buys this..may the force be with you!!!
Jan 1, 2008 1:06 AM
I am an Idea subscriber in India and I am a great fan of EPL and as I am leaving in hostel I suffer a great difficulty getting instant epl matches result so i want to know how can i get epl matches result on idea phones through sms?