By David Owen
October 21 – India’s Reliance Industries is mulling bidding for Indian streaming rights for the English Premier League and other top-notch sports competitions in future. Nita Ambani, a Reliance board member, told the Financial Times: “I would be very interested to get the digital rights of some of these games to be shown on digital in India.”
While Reliance, which is the country’s largest private-sector enterprise, has been known as an oil and petrochemicals company, its interests include the Jio mobile and broadband services business. Launched only in 2016, Jio is said to have well over 300 million subscribers.
Mumbai-based Reliance has done deals enabling it to show cricket through its JioTV app. Mrs Ambani, who owns the Mumbai Indians cricket team, told the FT that Reliance would consider other events such as English top-tier football.
“We will definitely look at it because I think it’s a huge business,” she said.
Star Sports is believed to have paid in the region of $100 million for exclusive rights to screen Premier League matches in India in its latest deal, running until 2022.
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