The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s media rights auction for international bilateral cricket in India has become a three-way contest with Star India, Sony Pictures Network and Reliance Jio bidding against each other.

There were six players initially, including media-tech giant Facebook and Google, but the BCCI zeroed in on the three contenders following technical and financial feasibility of all companies just before the bidding process began on Tuesday.

The e-auction, which is being conducted for the first time by BCCI, will resume tomorrow. During the five rounds of bidding that took place on the first day, the bid stood at ₹4,442 crore, a 15 per cent rise against the previous bid.

The BCCI is looking at the sale of media rights from April 2018 to March 2023.

The BCCI has set a base price, or per match value of ₹33 crore for ‘Global Television Rights’ plus ‘Rest of the World Digital Rights Package’; ₹7 crore for the Indian Subcontinent Digital Rights Package, and ₹40 crore for the Global Consolidated Rights Package.

The BCCI has listed a total of 102 matches that will form part of the ICC’s Future Tours Programme from June 2018 to March 2023. During this period, India will host 22 Tests, 45 ODIs and 35 T20s against nine opponents.

The bidding, which was a closed door process previously, has gone online to make it transparent. E-auction was also one of the recommendations of the Justice Lodha committee. The highest bidder remaining gets awarded the ownership of the rights.

The bidding is in three categories — the Indian television rights cum rest of the world digital rights (GTVRD; digital rights for the Indian subcontinent (ID) only; and, global consolidated rights (GCR) comprising television rights for the Indian sub-continent, rest of the world and the worldwide digital rights.

All three packages have different bids. For GTVRD, it will be ₹20 crore per bid, for ID it is ₹5 crore and for GCR it is ₹25 crore.

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