Sad to see, Star slowly going out of Sports business. It has many memories like 1999 India - Pak chennai test , 2003 India - Pak WC, etc.etc.
If Disney is not interested in sports, why it invested in star and demolishing their business, rather star could have been same as Old one.
Once Sports 18 launched, i thought new competitor comes in sports business , but now Star's vanish, it will be same two way competition.
Here r my views on the above point and topic in general based on own observation, analysis and understanding of the scenario
Bcoz sports business does not generate profit as rights of key cricket and even many niche properties is way too high and subscription + ad revenue not enough to recover the same .
India Cricket generates majority revenue but still not enough to recover investment made , other cricket events or niche sports properties hardly generate revenue barring few exceptions. Remember certain events like important matches in Cricket World Cup may get high ratings but does not attract much advertisers, since last few years even Indian Cricket ODI, T20, Test Matches too not attracting much ads thus broadcasters sustain financial losses....also with Jio/Viacom18 giving free access to sports on its OTT App the issues have further been elevated for Star Sports as a balanced investment - revenue model becomes more hard to achieve. Again niche sporting properties too are priced extremely high but broadcasters do not get required ads from premium brands thus again further mounting losses.
All in all Fox under Mudrochs had a different approach to operating business in India, they were okay with investing in sports biz looking for long term return on this investment but remember at that point brands still were more willing to buy ad slots for various events, sports properties were still lot more less priced than what these r now complimenting with good subscription revenue it generated both on TV + OTT. Also there were still other streams to attract mass + premium audience on both TV + OTT platforms and each helped to scale up revenue.
Now environment is drastically changed ,,in last few years overall Pay TV viewership is declining (though by minute margin) , there is immense competition on OTT front too thus expenditures r up but ads have not grown by that much as brands have various platforms to choose from as compared to earlier say pre 2019 where few OTT platforms were present and got more ads....also there is a certain OTT fatigue so not only many people r limiting the OTT platforms they subscribe to and with so much content each platform gets limited viewing time so subscription + ad revenue both r under some stress thus u r seeing more OTT platforms choosing to go for Freemium business model and getting themselves listed with various aggregator OTT services to widen audience base + revenue.
Lastly when a broadcaster buys sporting rights particularly cricket then apart from rights acquisition there r whole lot of other operational costs / expenses which it has to do to present the same to viewers be it logistics, transmission, getting onboard presenters/team, marketing etc so it also has to be factored while we decode expenses vs revenue.
More importantly do not worry Disney will continue to operate its TV + OTT business in India and Star Sports channels will continue, what will happen is some partnership at various fronts to lower the financial + operational burden. There is no outright sale or exit which i see happening as far as Star India TV + OTT business is concerned
. Is that mean parting Sports & Digital for sale started processing..? Recent news articles pointed the complete sale or partial sale of sports and OTT. The website changes indicates second chance is going to happen. Still wishing it not to be true. Sale of sports network & OTT alone is like it's closure.
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