Putting a price on the Cricket Diaspora

One of my more theoretical Long Tail examples was sports which are hits in their place of origin but niches elsewhere, something that applies as well to most college football as it does to the example I chose, cricket. The "Cricket Diaspora", which is millions of people, mostly from current and former Commonwealth countries who now live elsewhere, was a perfect example of how Long Tail tactics of reaching distributed demand could tap new markets.

Now, a couple years later, this is actually turning into a big business. From PaidContent:

"Reliance ADA Group, the Indian telecom and media conglomerate, has bought a 70 percent stake in Willow.tv, the Cricket webcasting site based in Sunnyvale, CA. The price was undisclosed, but according to Rajesh Sawhney, president of Reliance Entertainment, the company will spend about $60 million to $70 million in this acquisition and expansion together, quoted in WSJ.

Willow TV has been around for about five years, and named after the tree from which Cricket bats are made. It was among the first to start live webcasting cricket matches for expatriate audience worldwide, though a big part of its audience is South Asians in U.S. (including me). It charges anywhere from between $10 for a short series to $150 a full cricket tournament, depending on the countries and number of games involved. In 2007-08, the site has streamed most of the major tournaments live, including the Indian Premier League, Australian, South African and English cricket."

Comments

[Ottayan]

I agree completely.

However, I am bemused by the eagerness with which Indian's view NFL and F-1 racing.

Both these games have limited exposure in India.

For example, I understand that the Indian's are numerically the fastest growing audience for the F-1.

Clearly this phenomenon needs to be studied.

[julian.bond]

There's a lot to think about in the transition from
- Free to air TV. 4 channels
- Satellite and Cable. 1000 channels
- Internet Streamed TV. Unlimited channels
- Internet download TV. Unlimited snippets
And the associated business deals
- Channel exclusive agreements
- National and Continental exclusive agreements
- Agreements, what agreements?

Especially when it applies to things like minority sports. It's puzzled me for some time that minority sports are so badly served in the USA even on satellite/cable. And why USA TV seems to have an aversion to live broadcasts, preferring tape delayed.

[Jagadish]

Is the interest in cricket attributed to being born in England? But you mention (in some other post) that you only stayed there until you were five or six!

I suspect other similar examples would be access to broadcasts of regional language TV content (soaps, for e.g.) across the globe despite the primary market for the content living in the home country.

[Alexandre Rafalovitch]

Chris,

Have a look at Scottish Country Dancing (http://www.rscds.org/). The branches are all over the world and there are probably less Scots dancing it than people of other descent.

As for making money, in Japan (where SCD is surprisingly large niche), a person who wants to become a RSCDS teacher, will pay several thousands of dollars for training, accommodation, books, CDs, etc. It is also big in Germany. In New York, there are 3 dancing locations just in Manhattan and many more outside.

And that's without RSCDS even trying to profit from this; they just want to preserve the dancing.

[Boris Wertz]

Also check out what LiveCurrent is doing with www.cricket.com - they are trying to build the worldwide Internet cricket destination

[cricket score]

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