“Cricket is at a crossroads,” says Uday Shankar.
As vice-chairman of JioStar, a giant Indian platform that serves more than 500 million viewers, spends about $3.9 billion a year on content, and was founded in no small part on the back of cricket rights, he is not speaking as a neutral observer. In the 2022 Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament auction, the rights value soared to $6.2 billion, making it the second-highest valuation in the world after the NFL at $15 million per game. The board did a great job of being competitive to get there. The problem is that the world of buyers has since shrunk dramatically, and companies that are still competing are making the calculations, Shankar said. “Why should I expect JioStar to pay the same value for an India vs Afghanistan, India vs Bangladesh or India vs Sri Lanka match as I would pay for an India vs England or India vs Australia match?” he says. As far as he is concerned, the answer is ‘shouldn’t’, and until cricket’s administrators globally consider that, the sport risks being priced out of its major funding markets.
“JioStar is the goose that lays the golden egg,” he says. “They now have to decide whether to kill the goose or keep laying eggs.” He explains that there is active internal research into how much JioStar can contribute to the sport. Cricket’s scheduling framework, the Future Tour program, causes particular impatience. He says it looks like it was designed when the East India Company was still running the world.
He doesn’t expect a strike. He is sounding the alarm with a certain commercial logic. “There are good people in cricket administration,” he allows. “But the whole group of administrators around the world needs to come together because India and one or two media companies within India are very fundamental to the future of cricket.”
The market appears to be catching up to his claims. With the current rights cycle expiring in 2027 and a new auction scheduled for the 2028 season, analysts at Media Partners Asia are already expecting the next cycle to be flat at around $5.4 billion. This is comparable to the current contract in headline value at current exchange rates compared to 2022, but represents a 13% decrease on a per-game basis as the expanded schedule dilutes the value of individual games. The dynamics that led to the 2022 price surge are unlikely to be repeated, as the merger of Viacom18 and Disney’s India operations removed the main source of competitive tension from the previous auction.
The people saying this are not media executives who have come across cricket. He is a journalist at heart, someone who has made a career out of going places others don’t go, asking questions others don’t think to ask, and observing an India that most of his industry prefers to hold at arm’s length.
He was a student at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University in the early 1980s, a leftist, active campus activist, and convinced that he could change the country through politics. Then something clicked. “I realized just in time that nothing changes in politics,” he told Variety. “Politics changes people.” Instead, he became a journalist, deliberately choosing to go to Patna in the midst of Bihar’s upheavals, including the fall of the Mandal Commission, caste conflicts and far-left insurgency, as his colleagues followed him to the Economic Times and Times of India in Mumbai and Delhi.
My obsession with television started at a certain moment. In 1991, he watched coverage of the Gulf War on CNN at a friend’s house. At the time, access required a huge satellite dish and a lot of luck. He quickly realized that in a country with limited literacy and low newspaper penetration, television would be the most powerful means India had ever seen to reach its people. He quit his job at the Center for Science and Environment, where he was part of the founding team of the environmental publication Down to Earth, where he edited citizen reports on the state of India’s environment, and aspired to appear on television.
Several years of struggle ensued. As a freelancer, he was credited as an executive producer on small news packages, current affairs shows and shows anchored by Karan Thapar. He went for job interviews at news channels, most of which no longer exist. On one occasion, the woman who interviewed him gave her verdict at the end of the session. He doesn’t have what it takes to be successful in television, and her advice is to go back to printing. “I came home disappointed,” he says. “But I think it made me more determined.”
The break came when Arun Pury decided to start a news channel ‘Aaj Tak’ and gave Shankar a chance despite having limited experience in live news. “Credit goes to Arun Pury,” says Shankar. “It worked out beautifully for me.”
Then came the Murdoch family’s Star India. By the time he arrived, the network was successful but had plateaued. Its strength was in Hindi entertainment and it catered only to the urban middle class. He had early conversations with Rupert and James Murdoch that confirmed his intuition. He asked why we decided to double down on India when everyone else was focusing on the whole of Asia. Rupert’s answer was, “The power of a billion people and democracy. How wrong can we go?” Shankar saw the same thing. His response was a blitz of regional expansion in Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu that rewrote the logic of Indian television. He started Kabaddi League at a time when virtually no one believed in Kabaddi League. A friend told him that he was becoming too arrogant and no one would care. Approximately 450-500 million people currently watch the sport.
“The desire to obtain a better life for ourselves and the next generation was universal,” he says. “It wasn’t just limited to the middle class.”
Outside of cricket, Bodhi Tree, the investment platform he co-founded with James Murdoch in 2022 with some support from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, has invested heavily in media and education, the latter through the Allen Career Institute. Allen Career Institute prepares approximately 400,000 students annually for India’s relentlessly competitive engineering and medical entrance exams. “People in small villages in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh went to schools where physics teachers knew nothing about physics and math teachers knew nothing about mathematics. Thanks to support from companies like Allen, these people were able to qualify in medicine and engineering,” he says. Bodhi Tree’s theme is to digitize and further expand that access.
Conversations with Shankar about Bollywood are sharp. The success of Bollywood’s biggest recent hit, the Jio Studio-produced spy thriller Durandhar, has led Shankar to a sound diagnosis of what is plaguing the industry. He attributes the film’s success not to any organizational improvements in Bollywood, but to the fact that it was produced by people outside its normal circles. The same insularity of talent that has hampered Hindi films is, by contrast, avoided in cricket. “Despite all its problems, cricket has achieved one great thing: it has opened the gates wide for talent,” says Shankar. He called out Akash Deep, a pacer who grew up in a village in southern Bihar and ended up playing for India despite not having a cricket field or even a road. Shankar argues that until Bollywood moves beyond the familiar bubble of writers, directors and actors, it will continue to lose audiences to the Tamil, Telugu and Kannada industries it has already captured. “Movie audiences are way ahead of movie producers,” he says. “That’s the big crisis.”
When it comes to distribution, he offers some astute data points. In India, the number of active connected TVs now exceeds the number of pay TV households. The transition period has arrived. He doesn’t lose sleep over it because he believes the delivery method is far less important than the quality of the IP. The key is the part of the stack that no one touches: monetization. Streaming runs on the same two-legged model that newspapers invented more than 100 years ago: advertising and subscription fees. “Media companies have done a great job of innovating content,” he says. “However, innovation in monetization models remains completely non-existent.” AI is emerging not as a threat to creative work, but as a tool to produce content at lower unit costs and generate data that could generate new revenue streams.
He completely rejects the ‘media company’ label for what JioStar has become. He argues that technology and creativity are the only honest explanations. But the man who makes that claim spent his formative years reporting from drought-stricken villages and floodplains and, by his own account, never stopped thinking like a reporter. “The value I add is in asking questions,” he says. “People spend too much time trying to provide answers and not enough time asking the right questions. I remained a journalist at heart.”
In the end, it was trade that saved him from politics.
