David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…You need me. You need me, yeah. But of course, Lalit has a plan for this. He’s going to do just what he did back with ESPN in the first place back in the day. It’s not that hard to set up a new network to come in and bid on these rights. By the way, it is now clearly, demonstrably, and provably so much more valuable than back in the day. We’re now 15 years into the television penetration of India, shall we say. There are tons of other broadcasters and cable channels out there. They’re just not sports channels. Well, what’s a sports channel? That’s just a marketing term. It’s just a channel. You add another channel. You make ABC Sports, NBC Sports, CBS Sports, Fox Sports. Anybody can do this. Lalit goes to Sony who’s the number two broadcaster in India. He goes to Sky from the UK and says, hey, you want to enter India? And he ultimately goes to an Indian entertainment company called Nimbus, which was a broadcaster but also didn’t have a sports channel. He says to all of them, these rights are now available. Minimum bid is $500 million for four years. This is going to be very profitable for you. It’s very easy to set up a sports network. I’ve already done it. I will help you do it. You are welcome to bid. Nimbus ends up winning the auction with a $620 million bid for four years. They set up the Nimbus Sports Channel. It (I believe) quickly becomes the number one sports channel in India. There’s nothing else. If you got cricket, you’re the number one sports channel in India, and Star and Rupert are out in the cold. Wow. So Lalit really did make the BCCI an economic powerhouse where they really didn’t have material revenue before, and now suddenly they have hundreds of millions of dollars coming in, what, $200 million-ish a year between TV and sponsorships?…

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