I am guessing they are targeting for the North America/Western bases. Apple TV+ hasn't taken off yet in India, and thats why Apple has reduced the prices to Rs 99/month. I highly doubt if they will be given exclusive Indian digital rights they are just a 'tiny drop in the India's ocean of OTT players'.
They dont have a channel. Neither does Netflix or Facebook (who are reportedly in the fray). I am guessing these companies are looking to launch live streaming in the coming year and add the IPL to their roster, to start off with?
As
@Parth D mentioned the rights have been split this time round. The companies involved can choose to bid for a specific region/ Indian subcontinent,etc. Apple might fancy their chances in the digital rights streaming only. Same for Facebook and Netflix, I believe. The other important thing to note is that these rights cannot be sub-let by the holders.
For e.g- Last time time the media agency GroupM entered the bidding without representing a client. ad they won, they could have split it up and sold it off. This won't be allowed.
BCCI will then choose the highest bidder.
Last time around, if we see, Facebook was leading in digital rights and Sony was winning in TV media rights individually.
But Star gave a consolidated bid for all regions combined with both TV media as well as digital rights. The consolidated bid were higher than both Facebook and Sony combined. Hence, Star won the entire rights worldwide. They then retained the broadcasting for India. And sold off other region rights to other companies by themselves.
You are right. This time, for one company to get all rights is close to impossible. My belief is that we will see highest bids for the Indian sub-continent and a bigger fight for the digital rights. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how it pans out.
Personally, I'd like to see them move away from the Star family- used to like Star earlier, but their content has been quite poor since ESPN parted ways with them.
It's Star to continue for sure then.
Ideal scenario- BCCI will choose the highest bidder. It has been that way since 2007 and we've seen many conditions being added to the ITT document since. This is an off-shoot of the fact that ZEE somehow won the rights by bidding huge amounts in 2005-2007.
Since the BCCI also mentioned that media houses cannot come together, it does increasingly seem that the biggest broadcaster may end up winning the rights. i.e. Star or Sony. There were talks of Sony merging with Zee and Reliance trying to put in a joint bid. However, that doesnt seem to happen now.