This is part three of the four-part series “The Crisis at Disney”
On June 14, multiple business news outlets carried variations of the headline “Disney Loses Streaming Rights for Indian Premier League Cricket.” The coverage within these outlets detailed how a consortium that included Paramount Global outbid current rights owner, the Walt Disney Co., by paying $2.6 billion for the Indian subcontinent streaming rights to the IPL cricket tournament for 2023 through 2027, with many observers insisting this was a misstep for Disney.
These same observers declined to fixate on the fact Disney secured the television rights to broadcast the matches in the Indian subcontinent from 2023 to 2027 for $3 billion, and most of them failed to emphasize that Disney was not aggressively focused on retaining the streaming rights….