Daybreak - Free cricket was Jio’s big play. It’s also why the maths stopped mathing

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Yesterday, the Economic Times reported that JioStar has told the ICC it wants to exit its India media rights deal for cricket events, even with two years still left in the cycle. The company also doubled its provisions for expected losses suggesting the rights may cost more to deliver than they can earn back. It all started in late 2024 when Jio came in and flipped the script by streaming cricket tournaments for free and leaning towards a more ad-heavy model. For viewers, it felt like progress. But now with the drop in ad spending from online money gaming platforms after new regulations, Jio is feeling the squeeze.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording.

Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Do you remember how we watched ICC tournaments two years ago, World Cups, T20s, Champions Trophy? Everything was locked behind the Hot Star subscription. You paid or you did not.

watch. And then, in late 2024, Gio entered the chat. And it was the usual Reliance M.O. Just walk into any sector and disrupt it with the sheer weight of your capital. No subscription, no paywall. All you needed was to download the app. And lo and behold, cricket, the biggest money-making spectacle of India, became something that you could watch without paying a rupee. And here is where things start to get interesting. The very company that made ICC cricket free, Gio now wants to walk away from the ICC media rights deal altogether. Not because the cricket is bad or because people are not interested,

but because the numbers behind free streaming no longer add up. The ICC deal that once looked like a crown jewel is now a contract that Gio is expecting to lose money on. So much so that the Economic Times reported yesterday that Gio has formally told the ICC that it warns out. Meanwhile, ICC is going around trying to sell the next cycle of streaming rights to other platforms like Netflix and Prime, but nobody seems interested. So what happened?

How did a move that made cricket more accessible end up breaking the economics behind it? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nidhar Sharma, and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, My colleague Rachel Vargis and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 9th of December. When I say free cricket has broken the business, it could sound like an exaggeration. But once you look at how streaming works in India and what companies like Hot Star and Geo actually set in their regulatory filings, the picture becomes clearer.

Now, let us start with the basics. For years, the business model around ICC tournaments in India was pretty straightforward. The rights holder would charge viewers through a subscription and then supplement that with advertising. Hot Star followed this playbook for multiple ICC cycles. Subscriptions were not everything, but they provided a steady floor, a predictable chunk of revenue that you could rely on even before you sold a single ad slot. But that changed when Gio entered the scene and made ICC cricket free to stream. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with offering something

for free. Companies do it all the time for scale. The issue is what happens after people become used to it. Once a premium product becomes free at mass scale, it is very hard to rebuild a paywall around it. And in India, where price sensitivity is high, that shift in consumer expectations is even stronger. So almost overnight, subscriptions stopped being a meaningful revenue line for ICC wins. And that left Gio with only one side of the business to carry the entire weight of the $3 billion streaming rights. And it was advertising. Now, advertising alone can support a big sports rights deal, but only under certain conditions. You need consistent demand, predictable spending and a broad base of advertisers willing to pay premium prices.

But what actually happened was the opposite. A few months ago, one of the largest advertiser categories for cricket broadcasts, which is real money gaming and fantasy gaming apps, pulled back significantly after online money gaming was banned. And I'm sure you know this, platforms like Dream 11 had been among the biggest sponsors during ICC events and other tournaments. With them gone, the ad market suddenly looked much thinner. And this is where the numbers disclosed by GEOs start to make sense.

In its latest annual filings, GEO Star more than doubled its provisions for expected losses on long-term sports and content contracts, from a little over $12,000 crore to more than $25,000 now. A provision, by the way, for anyone outside the finance world, is not a loss today. It is an acknowledgement that when you add up what you expect to earn in the remaining years of a contract and compare that with what it will cost to fulfil that contract, the math no longer works in your favour. The same pattern also showed up earlier at Star India before its merger with Wycom 18. In its financial statements for the year that ended in March 24, Star booked a provision of a little over 12,000 crore rupees linked to its I.

ICC rights. That provision was the main reason that the company reported a standalone net loss of more than $12,000 crore that year. Again, the provision is not the loss itself, it is the company signaling that the contract is expected to lose money overtime. Now, both of these instances point to the same issue. This is not just a fluke or a one-off bad quarter. It is the sign of a structural shift. The expected revenue from ICC rights, has weakened. And when you trace the timeline, that weakening lines up neatly with geo-moving cricket from a subscription-backed model to a free ad-only model. Plus, the fact that a major advertiser category online gaming also shrank. So a change in consumer behavior, everybody expecting free cricket

basically, collided with a change in advertiser behavior, which is big spenders pulling back. and the result is showing up as expected losses on balance sheets. Not because cricket became less popular, but because the underlying economics changed. Stay tuned for more on this. If you zoom out a little, the result of this shift is playing out in the broader sports and media industry as well. A few years ago, ICC rights in India was seen as one of the most coveted properties in the market.

Now, the Economic Times reported that ICC has sounded up. major platforms, Sony, Amazon, Netflix, ahead of the next cycle. But there hasn't been much enthusiasm. And that is because now they are looking at a rights landscape where the two main revenue pillars, which is subscriptions and advertising, are both less reliable. Another important point to remember is that live sports like T20 cricket are hugely popular, yes, but they are not the most dependable format from a viewership standpoint. Unlike daily TV shows or ongoing series, T20 matches arrive in bursts. There will be a heavy cluster of games during a tournament, but after that there are long gaps with no action.

And this creates sharp peaks in viewership, especially for marquee matches and equally sharp drop-offs on the other days. And for streamers, this makes the audience engagement unpredictable. They basically need to spend a lot of money to build massive capacities, for the peak night traffic, but that demand is not steady or sustained enough to justify the cost year-round. That is why GeoStar has reportedly told the ICC that it wants to exit the deal before the term ends. And it also explains why Starr's earlier ICC deal weighed so heavily on its books.

In both cases, the companies would not say cricket is not worth it. They were saying that the current model to monetize cricket is not worth it. So what does this mean for the next set of cricket broadcast rights? The most likely possibility is that streaming platforms will simply bid way more conservatively from hereon. And ICC may need to rethink how it packages and prices its rights for India, which is its biggest market by far. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small side. sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories,

newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Snitha Sharma and edited by Rajiv Sien.