Cricket Broadcasting in India: Radio to Streaming

The money that runs world cricket is, at bottom, the price of showing Indian cricket to Indians. Every franchise valuation, every player auction, every argument about the international calendar traces back to a set of broadcast contracts signed in Mumbai. It is easy to forget that this machine is barely three decades old, and that for most of the twentieth century the Indian fan's connection to the game was a single voice on a shortwave radio, describing a match the listener would never see.

How the country moved from that voice to a five-billion-dollar rights auction is a story with a genuine hinge point: a court case in 1995 that began as a squabble over who could televise a one-day tournament in Calcutta and ended with the Supreme Court declaring that the airwaves belong to the public, not the government. Almost everything about modern Indian cricket's finances follows from that judgment.

A voice before a picture

Indian cricket broadcasting begins with radio, and radio begins with A. F. S. "Bobby" Talyarkhan. In November 1934 he commentated on a Bombay Gymkhana match between the Parsees and the Muslims, and through the late 1930s and 1940s his ball-by-ball descriptions of the Bombay communal tournaments made him a celebrity in his own right. He worked alone, all day, mixing the play with anecdote and history, and he was possessive about it — when All India Radio moved towards panels of commentators sharing a session, he largely walked away rather than share the microphone.

AIR built on that foundation for decades. For the generations who followed India's Test sides of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the commentary box was the game. Transistor radios pressed to ears in trains, classrooms and offices were the national match-day experience long before a television picture was widely available, and the commentators — in English and, increasingly, in Hindi — became household names in a way few of today's broadcasters manage. That story, and the languages it was told in, has its own page on how India's commentary found its many languages.

Television arrives slowly

Doordarshan began experimental transmission from Delhi in 1959 with a range of a few dozen kilometres, and its earliest live cricket coverage came in the mid-1960s. But for years television cricket in India meant a grainy monochrome picture available in a handful of cities, supplementing radio rather than replacing it. The infrastructure simply did not exist: transmitters covered little of the country, and a television set was an expensive rarity.

Two events changed the scale. The 1982 Asian Games in Delhi pushed the government into a rapid expansion of colour transmission, and the 1983 World Cup gave the newly colour-capable network something the whole country wanted to watch. Doordarshan carried India's march to the final at Lord's using the BBC's pictures, and the sight of Kapil Dev lifting the trophy on television sets across the country did as much as the result itself to turn cricket into India's mass obsession. The tournament also produced Indian broadcasting's great missing reel: Kapil's 175 not out against Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells was never filmed, because a BBC technicians' strike meant no cameras were at the ground. The finest one-day innings by an Indian of that era survives only as a scorecard and the memories of a small crowd — the fuller story of that campaign is on the 1983 World Cup page.

Through the rest of the 1980s Doordarshan was the only screen in town. It held a legal monopoly on broadcasting within India, it paid the cricket board little or nothing for the privilege — for years the argument was over whether the board should pay Doordarshan a production fee — and its coverage, with limited cameras and no incentive to improve, lagged well behind what Channel Nine was doing in Australia.

The Hero Cup and the fight over the airwaves

The hinge came in November 1993. The Cricket Association of Bengal organised the Hero Cup, a five-nation one-day tournament marking its diamond jubilee, and decided it would not simply hand the pictures to Doordarshan. After negotiations with DD stalled, the CAB sold production and overseas rights to Trans World International, which partnered with the Star TV satellite network for distribution across Asia.

The state's response was blunt. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting invoked the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 to insist that only Doordarshan could uplink a live signal from Indian soil, and days before the tournament began, customs officials seized TWI's broadcast equipment at Calcutta airport. The CAB went to court, the tournament was televised under interim arrangements, and the underlying question — who owns the right to broadcast an event, the organiser or the state — went to the Supreme Court.

In February 1995 the court delivered one of the most consequential judgments in Indian media history. In Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting v. Cricket Association of Bengal it held that the airwaves are public property, that a government monopoly over them violated the constitutional guarantee of free speech, and that an event organiser could not be forced to hand its signal to the state broadcaster. The judgment did not merely settle a cricket dispute; it broke the legal foundation of the Doordarshan monopoly and opened Indian skies to private broadcasting.

The satellite decade

The consequences arrived fast. The 1996 World Cup, co-hosted by India, was sold to a private rights-holder — Mark Mascarenhas's WorldTel — for a sum that stunned administrators used to treating television as a cost rather than a revenue. Satellite sports channels, led by Star Sports and ESPN, bid against each other for Indian cricket through the late 1990s and 2000s, and each cycle of bilateral rights sold for multiples of the last. The board that had once paid to be televised became, within a decade, the richest governing body in the sport, a transformation covered in more depth in the guide to how the BCCI is structured.

Production standards rose with the money. Private producers brought more cameras, stump microphones, slow-motion replays and specialist directors to Indian grounds, and a generation of retired players — Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri foremost among them — moved into the commentary box and became as familiar to viewers as the players they described.

The IPL makes television the product

The Indian Premier League was designed from the first day as a television event: a three-hour prime-time format, city franchises, and a rights sale conducted before a ball had been bowled. The escalation since tells the whole story of Indian sports media in three lines.

Cycle	Rights holder	Reported value
2008-2017	Sony (WSG partnership)	About Rs 8,200 crore over ten years
2018-2022	Star India	Rs 16,347.5 crore over five years
2023-2027	Disney Star (TV) and Viacom18 (digital)	Rs 48,390 crore over five years combined

The 2022 auction for the 2023-27 cycle was a landmark for a second reason: for the first time anywhere in Indian sport, the digital rights sold for a sum comparable to — and in the exclusive packages exceeding — the television rights. The league's economics, and the player auction the broadcast money funds, are explained in how the IPL auction works.

The law that keeps the biggest matches free

The rights boom created an obvious tension: if every important match sat behind a pay-TV subscription, the majority of Indian households would lose access to the national team. Parliament answered with the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Act of 2007, which requires private rights-holders to share the live signal of sporting events of national importance with the public broadcaster, with revenue split between them. It is why an India World Cup match can be sold for enormous sums and still appear on Doordarshan's free terrestrial network. The definition of which matches qualify — broadly, major ICC tournaments and India's own fixtures — has been contested at the margins ever since, but the principle has held.

Streaming changes the count

The most recent shift is the one still under way. Smartphone data became cheap in India after 2016, and streaming platforms discovered that live cricket was the one product that could acquire users in the hundreds of millions. Hotstar's IPL streams broke concurrent-viewing records repeatedly; then JioCinema, having taken the digital rights from 2023, streamed the IPL free of charge and pushed the numbers higher still. In 2024-25 the Disney and Reliance media businesses in India merged, bringing the league's television and streaming rights under a single roof and creating one of the largest media companies in the country, built to a striking degree on cricket.

Streaming has also changed what a broadcast is. A single match now goes out in multiple languages on separate feeds, with alternative commentary aimed at different audiences, and the vertical phone-screen feed is produced as deliberately as the television picture. The commentary box that Talyarkhan refused to share now holds dozens of voices per match.

What survived from the radio era

Radio did not die with the arrival of the picture; it faded, unevenly, over decades. AIR carried ball-by-ball commentary on India's home internationals long into the satellite era, and for drivers, farmers and anyone beyond the reach of a cable connection it remained the live game well into the 2000s. What eventually undermined it was not television but the mobile phone: once a score, and then a stream, was available in every pocket, the dedicated radio commentary lost its audience faster than it lost its charm, and by the mid-2010s live radio coverage of Indian cricket had become intermittent enough that administrators were discussing how to revive it.

England kept its equivalent alive as a national institution, and the contrast is instructive — the story of Test Match Special is one of a broadcaster deciding that radio cricket was worth protecting for its own sake. India made a different, unsentimental choice: the audience had moved, so the coverage moved with it. What survived instead was the grammar the radio men invented. The unhurried scene-setting between balls, the score repeated for the listener who just tuned in, the digression into anecdote while a bowler walks back — all of it carried over first into television commentary and now into streaming feeds, where a Hindi or Tamil commentator working a phone-screen broadcast is recognisably doing Talyarkhan's job with better tools.

What the broadcast money did to the game

It is hard to overstate how completely broadcasting revenue reshaped Indian cricket. It funded the expansion of the domestic game — match fees in the Ranji Trophy rose from token sums to a professional living on the back of central revenues. It gave the BCCI decisive weight in the ICC's revenue model, since Indian rights underwrite global tournaments. It built the women's game a platform: the Women's Premier League's rights sold for sums no women's league outside the United States had seen. And it changed the calendar, because a board whose income depends on Indian eyeballs schedules cricket, reasonably enough, for Indian prime time.

There are costs in the ledger too. Free-to-air general access has narrowed outside the protected national fixtures; Test cricket must fight for production attention against the franchise game; and the sheer value of the rights gives broadcasters an influence over scheduling that administrators of the radio era would have found unimaginable. Both sides of that argument are conducted loudly, every rights cycle, in the Indian press — which is itself a sign of how central the broadcast contract has become. The rest of the Indian game, from grounds to pathways, sits on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

This page rests on the text of the Supreme Court's 1995 judgment in the Cricket Association of Bengal case and the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Act 2007 as published by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, on Prasar Bharati's own institutional history of Doordarshan, and on contemporary reporting of the Hero Cup dispute and the IPL rights auctions. Rights figures are the widely reported contract values announced at the time of each sale and are given as reported totals, not audited sums. Early radio history follows published accounts of A. F. S. Talyarkhan's career. Where precise dates or figures could not be verified against such sources — early Doordarshan cricket telecasts in particular — the page describes them in general terms. This article is descriptive; no computed statistics are claimed.