just found this.. interesting!!
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MARCH 7, 2010.Great Expectations for Cricket
Indian Premier League Commissioner Modi sees the NBA as an inspiration, and goal.ArticleComments (12)more in India
By JONATHAN CLEGG
At a time when some of Europe's leading football teams are on the brink of bankruptcy, when golf is battling to survive
without its leading light, and the threat of a labor stoppage looms over the National Football League, sports administrators could be forgiven for doing their best to damp expectations.
Not so Indian Premier League Commissioner Lalit Modi.
No need Deccan Chargers players celebrate in May after winning the final of the Indian Premier League Twenty20 cricket match aginst the Royal Challengers Bangalore.
.
Less than a week before the Deccan Chargers start the defense of their trophy against the Kolkatta Knight Riders in the third IPL season, the most powerful—and polarizing—figure in cricket has outlined his plan to make the tournament the most-watched sporting event on the planet. "Our objective is to be the single largest sporting league in the world, and we have an opportunity to get there," Mr. Modi says.
Such ambitious talk is at odds with the air of quiet reservation traditionally associated with this quintessential English game.
But then Mr. Modi, 46 years old, has shaken cricket from top to bottom since he and his colleagues took control of the Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI), the sport's national governing body, in 2005.
Reorganizing the sport along business lines, he negotiated record sponsorship and broadcast deals for the India national team. Three years later, he launched IPL: an enterprising league with deep pockets that has left the cricket establishment agog and has taken the commercialization of sport to a new level.
Bringing together Bollywood, big business and Twenty20—a short version of cricket in which each team bowls 20 overs (sets of six balls) and matches last about three hours—the IPL has drawn thousands of frenzied supporters, attracted millions of dollars of television advertising and handed an elite band of international players previously unheard-of riches.
In short, he has transformed the way cricket is played and watched around the world.
Fresh evidence of the IPL's money-spinning potential should have been provided in Mumbai yesterday with the proposed unveiling of two new franchises for the eight-team league, recently valued at $2 billion by Brand Finance UK.
Yet the star-studded event fell flat as organizers were forced to scrap the existing tender procedure after bidders objected to stringent financial demands—notably, a clause requiring each prospective owner to have a net worth of $1 billion.
After weeks of hype leading up to the announcement, the low-key response—under the demanding criteria, only three bidders showed interest—was something of a letdown. Yet Mr. Modi sees no let-up in cricket's commercial revolution.
"There are 1.2 billion people in India who eat, drink, live and breathe cricket, so we've got that advantage—the sheer numbers in our country.
"If those numbers of people are watching, then advertisers will follow, and [the IPL] will continue to grow. It will take us a few years to get to the level of the top sports leagues in the world—they've been there a long time and have built huge fan bases—but we've got numbers on our side."
If India's cricket-mad population lends a certain logic to Mr. Modi's global plans, that isn't the limit of his ambition.
In January, the IPL announced a deal with YouTube to stream live games free in every country except [/u] the U.S. (Willow TV holds the North America internet rights), making it the first major sporting event to be streamed across the globe.
Last week, Mr. Modi agreed to a deal with U.K. network-TV station ITV to air each of the six-week tournament's 60 matches, the first time live cricket has been broadcast on free-to-air TV in Britain since 2005.
Now he wants to knock soccer off its perch as the world's game.
"It's important for us to make sure that the product is available globally. Last year we were averaging 90-odd million eyeballs. But this year, we've got some great new partners, and
we're hoping to hit 150 million eyeballs a day. With YouTube, it allows us to go in and make sure that anybody in the world is able to watch the game of cricket. We want to be the largest sporting event in the world."
Properly marketed, Mr. Modi believes Twenty20 cricket can take over the world—including the U.S.
"Obviously the U.S. market is more focused on American sports now, but I think Twenty20, with its three-hour format, lends itself to new markets," says Mr. Modi, who expects to stage IPL matches in the country by next year. "It's a very explosive game, there's always action all the time and the fortunes of a team change with every ball. That becomes extremely important from a viewership point of view and also from an excitement point of view."
The powerhouse franchises of U.S. sport aren't likely to be hit by cricket just yet. Though the sport has been played in the U.S. since the days of George Washington—himself a keen player—cricket has never managed to establish a significant foothold in the country.
But Mr. Modi is convinced the IPL can crack the American market —which includes roughly three million Asian Indians, according to the last census—and has a history of coming good on his ambitious pronouncements. Before he launched the IPL in 2008,
Mr. Modi boldly claimed he could get $1 billion for 10 years' worth of TV rights for his new tournament—then did. This aggressive brand of sports capitalism has drawn charges that Mr. Modi has sold the sport's soul. In particular, purists fear for the future of Test cricket, the longest, highest form of the game that unfolds over five days, which has seen a marked decline in TV viewing outside of the U.K. and Australia.
Commenting on these criticisms, Mr. Modi is adamant the IPL's success is "growing the pie" for the sport as a whole. He remains marketing director of the BCCI, which is responsible for India's Test and One-Day (a medium-length format comprising 50 overs a side) teams and says both have a future, although he expects Twenty20 to become the dominant format of the sport.
"I think Test cricket will always be the pinnacle of all forms of cricket in terms of skill, and people will continue to watch that, although we must tweak it to make it more convenient to watch," he says, adding that the introduction of day-night was behind the explosion of popularity in Twenty20.
Yet Mr. Modi is less certain about the future of club cricket outside the IPL. Now that India is firmly established as the most lucrative market, the world's top players—who can make up to $200,000 for a fortnight's work in the IPL, as opposed to roughly £40,000-a-year in England's County Championship—are likely to gravitate toward the sub-continent.
With sponsors and advertisers sure to follow, administrators in England especially are haunted by the prospect of the IPL becoming cricket's equivalent of the National Basketball Association—the only club league of consequence and the inevitable destination for all the world's top stars.
To be like the NBA "is our aim and that's what we hope to achieve," Mr. Modi says.Write to Jonathan Clegg at jonathan.clegg@wsj.com 
AuthorTopic: Watching IPL on internet.. (Read 520 times)
August 04, 2006, 07:21:03 PM