After domestic success, next growth for IPL to come from international markets

In just its third year and running successfully, the Indian Premier League (IPL) has been a runaway success. However, despite the commercial success, IPL has a long way to go before it can join the ranks of EPL (English Premier League) or the Super Bowl.

But this has in no way dampened advertisers’ confidence in brand IPL as was seen in the response during the recent bidding of two new IPL teams of Pune and Kochi, which went for over Rs 3,000 crore.

This year has seen the League sign a broadcast deal for UK, wherein IPL 2010 is being broadcast exclusively on ITV, one of the oldest and largest commercial TV networks in the UK. Early this year, Google bagged exclusive online rights for IPL content for two years. Singapore-based venture capitalist Sigma Venture, jointly with their technology partner Chennai-based DCI Mobile Studios, a division of Dot Com Infoway Ltd (DCI), had acquired the global mobile application rights for IPL on an exclusive basis. Apart from online, IPL has also allotted mobile rights for SMS, MMS, 3G and IVR related services to vRock Mobile for a period of five years.

These are just a few steps taken by IPL to reach out to cricket fans globally, and while IPL has a huge domestic fan following, there is also a school of thought that believes that the real growth for IPL will come from the international market. Following the commercial success of IPL, how can it broaden its fanfare, and what are the lessons IPL can learn from EPL? The two arguably cannot be compared and some would say that cricket has a limited fan following unlike football. exchange4media finds out more on this from media planners.