Sony Footage Networks India (SPNI) has agreed a cricket rights broadcast deal stretching eight years with the Asian Cricket Council.

The deal encompasses all editions of the Males’s and Girls’s Asia Cups, Males’s and Girls’s Beneath-19 Asia Cups, and the Males’s and Girls’s Rising Groups Asia Cups.

The settlement was sealed after a bidding course of and the profitable bid represents a 70% improve within the rights worth, the ACC stated with out sharing the bid value. Quoting nameless sources, a number of Indian media sources reported the worth of the contract at $170 million.

The substantial improve in rights worth “will allow the ACC to channel important assets into grassroots applications, infrastructure growth, and expertise pathways, particularly for affiliate nations,” the group stated.

“Congratulations to the ACC for conducting a good and clear bidding course of for the rights to the ACC tournaments! We’re delighted to carry these action-packed tournaments, which will even embody India and Pakistan matches, to our viewers for the following 8 years,” stated SPNI’s MD & CEO, Gaurav Banerjee.

Sony had been seeking to broaden its TV and streaming companies in India via a merger cope with Zee Leisure Enterprises. However that deal collapsed in January after greater than two years of negotiations. That has left mid-sized TV operators in India seeking to discover new methods of increasing their scale.

Cricket rights, specifically, are an important battleground for broadcasters and streamers as they generate big audiences and drive promoting and subscriber acquisition.

India’s anti-monopolies regulator earlier this 12 months expressed concern a couple of focus of cricket rights within the fingers of Reliance Industries (Viacom18, Jio) and Disney. Regardless of the concerns, these two corporations have been granted regulatory approval to merge. Indian media sources stated that Jio and Disney didn’t submit bids for the ACC rights.

Earlier this 12 months, SPNI acquired TV and digital rights to all New Zealand-based males’s and ladies’s cricket matches into India and related territories for the following seven years. The deal is legitimate from Might 1, 2024 via April 30, 2031, encompassing India’s excursions of New Zealand within the 2026-27 and 2030-31 summers, in addition to all different bilateral Exams, ODIs, and T20Is performed in New Zealand throughout the interval. All matches might be broadcast throughout SPNI’s sports activities channels and streamed on SonyLIV.