CHENNAI: The sleeping giant that is the Women’s Indian Premier League is finally awake as the BCCI, on Monday, announced that Viacom18 Media has acquired the media rights for the first five seasons of the tournament for a massive cumulative sum of Rs 951 crores.
With 22 matches per year for the first three seasons and a possibility of increasing it to 33/34 games for 2026-27 seasons, Viacom18 will be paying a whopping Rs 7.09 crore per match till 2027. In the closed bidding that happened on Monday, Viacom18 and Disney Star seemingly competed for the TV and digital rights and the former came out as the winner.
“The broadcasters play a key role in taking the game to a wider audience and their active interest in the league is a clear indication that the Women’s Indian Premier League is headed in the right direction. The journey has well and truly started and we will take another major step this month when the five franchises are announced,” BCCI secretary Jay Shah said in a statement.
To put into context how big this is, Disney Star paid Rs 2.5 crore per match in the Women's T20 Challenge, which was seen as an add-on to the Men's Indian Premier League package. When the IPL was started in 2008, Sony had paid approximately Rs12.73 crore per match (Rs8200 crore for 644 games) in the first 10 years.
And as the BCCI President Roger Binny had said, it is hard not to see the impact the recent India-Australia bilateral series could have had. Although the hosts lost 1-4, fans packed the stadiums in Mumbai, with the second T20I witnessing over 45,000 spectators in the stands. From a broadcasting point of view, the official streaming partner had 10-12L concurrent viewership the average number of viewers simultaneously watching the stream at any one time for the most part of the high-scoring series.
This is just the beginning though. The BCCI is expected to announce the five franchises on January 25, and the player auction is set to be conducted early in February. Amidst all this, there is a U19 T20 World Cup and the senior T20 World Cup to be won as well. If all goes well, by the time the inaugural edition comes to an end in the last week of March, women’s cricket in this country would have transformed forever.