MUMBAI: NP Singh, Sony Pictures Networks India’s long serving managing director and CEO, asserts that despite losing out to rival Star India as the “broadcast custodian” of the Indian Premier League, SPN remains on a strong footing in the sporting rights arena.
The resurgence of the SPN’s online streaming platform SonyLIV and foray into different Indian regional languages is standing his network, which will complete 25 years in India next year, in good stead, Singh maintains, in an interview to Fortune India.
Asked about how the network has managed its businesses after the loss of the IPL rights from the 2018 season, Singh said: “We were a strong company when IPL didn’t exist and continue to be one. When the IPL was conceived there weren’t many supporters, but we put our hand up and said we will support it since we believed in it. For 10 years we supported the IPL and it did well for us. It grew into a big brand with the help of the marketing and promotions that we did. Every year’s marketing campaign became iconic—from Manoranjan Ka Baap to 10 Saal Aapke Naam.
“When you have a good thing going, you cannot always count on it alone and you need to have backup plans in place. Which is what we started to do much before the renewal of the IPL broadcast rights was on the anvil (in 2017). And that has helped us transition. It has been two years since we last aired IPL in 2017 and our revenues have only grown in this period, and not fallen.
“We have created some other big properties in the sports genre. We acquired Ten Sports, which was an important acquisition for us. We have football, cricket, and WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment).
“We continue to make investments in acquisition of sports rights. We have next year’s Tokyo Olympics coming up, as well as the next Asian Games. We have the rights to telecast matches of all cricket boards outside India, except Bangladesh and New Zealand. Also, wherever there is a possibility we see the potential of domestic sports leagues as well. As a strategy, we decided years ago that we will get into sports that aren’t that popular in India and help promote them, like NBA (basketball) and UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship).”
Singh’s parting words on the loss of the IPL rights: “If there was one person around to stick with the IPL from its first season to the 10th, it was me. But I did not lose one night’s sleep after [losing] IPL.”
For the record, SPN, an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan’s Sony Corporation, has 29 channels, and different arms for movie, television, and digital production. Its channels are available in 167 countries, and its reach in India spans 700 million viewers across 170 million households.
