MUMBAI: The wait is over as cricket?s biggest extravaganza is back with a bang and there are a lot of new things to look forward to. For those uninitiated, the cash-rich league has got a new title sponsor in Pepsi, a new franchise in Sunrisers Hyderabad and has found a new home in Sony Six which will simulcast the event along with sister channel Sony Max.

Multi Screen Media (MSM), IPL?s broadcast rights partner, is sitting pretty this year having roped in 11 broadcast sponsors unlike last year when the broadcaster had to go into the tournament with unsold inventories as it refused to bow down before the advertisers who were asking for rate reduction.

The broadcaster had this year played the volume game by rationalising ad rates by 10 per cent. The reduction in ad rate did the trick with old sponsors like Samsung and Godrej coming back on-board and new ones like Parle jumping on to the IPL bandwagon.

The co-presenting sponsors are Pepsi and Vodafone while the nine associate sponsors include Tata Photon, Samsung Mobile, Panasonic, Havells, Usha Appliances, Karbonn Tablets, Godrej, and Parle.

MSM president network sales, licensing and telephony Rohit Gupta told Indiantelevision.com that 90 per cent of the inventory had been sold out, at the time of writing. The remaining inventory will be sold at later stage of the tournament at a premium.

?We have got 11 sponsors on-board this year and have sold 90 per cent of the inventory. We have seen a growth of 25-30 per cent. We have also expanded our advertiser base due to entry of new advertisers and the return of old advertisers due to rate reduction,? Gupta asserted.

Encouraged by the response, the broadcaster has increased spot buy rates to Rs 500,000 per 10 second spot, says Gupta. It has also hiked spot rates for semi-finals as well as the final match to Rs 1.5 million per 10 second spot compared to Rs 1-1.2 million last year.

Vivaki Exchange CEO Mona Jain had earlier told Indiantelevision.com that the broadcaster will earn Rs 8.5 billion in ad revenue up Rs 1.5 billion from Rs 7 billion last year.

The good news for the broadcaster is that average television rating for the IPL is expected to increase 2.6 per cent to 3.9 TVR for CS15+ years, Male/Female, SEC ABC, as per MEC. Mumbai Indians (4.5 TVR), Kolkata Knight Riders (4.2 TVR) and Chennai Super Kings (4.1 TVR) games are projected to have the highest ratings.

It?s been a mixed bag for Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) though. While it had managed to strike a huge title sponsorship deal with Pepsi valued Rs 3.96 billion over a period of five years it has been unable to retain associate on-ground sponsors with the sole exception of Vodafone.

With Citi, Hero MotoCorp, Volkswagen, Karbonn Mobiles and Fly Kingfisher refusing to renew deals for different reasons the BCCI had to scout for new sponsors that saw Yes Bank and Star Plus coming on-board.

IPL on the go

The consumption of IPL is not just happening on television. The digital medium is slowly gaining traction among discerning consumers and the direct beneficiary of this alternate viewing is Times Internet Limited (TIL), the new media arm of Times Group, which has the global digital rights of the IPL including radio, internet and mobile.

TIL recently renewed its partnership with YouTube for 2013 and 2014 that will enable it to stream all 76 matches of IPL season 6 on its over-the-top (OTT) platform Boxtv.com and its dedicated YouTube channel youtube.com/indiatimes.

As part of the deal, YouTube will also have exclusive live-streaming rights for desktop web viewing (with a five minute delay in India) and non-exclusive rights for mobile viewing through the 2013 and 2014 tournaments.

India?s leading mobile TV service nexGTv has also bagged the official mobile streaming rights of Pepsi IPL 2013.

?IPL has been a big driver for us, in steadily engaging and growing our young, sports savvy users over the last two years, ? says TIL CEO Satyan Gajwani. ?We saw a 43 per cent growth in audience base just last year on IPL online. Our partnership with YouTube is strategic in building supplementary touch points with these audiences and we?re happy to renew our association with it.?

Then there is huge activity that BCCI has planned for Twitterati by coming up with initiatives which will allow Twitter users to have their tweets broadcast on television. That is surely going to set the Twitter universe abuzz with activity around IPL 6.

Opening ceremony

At the time of writing, there was a mad scramble for tickets to attend the opening ceremony at the Salt Lake stadium in Kolkatta. Llive performances from a medley of international artists including music sensation Pitbull along with flying drummers, Chinese percussionists, awesome fireworks and some of the biggest Indian film stars including Shah Rukh Khan, Katrina Kaif and Deepika Padukone kept the audience swaying in their seats.

It set the tone for Season 6 of IPL, the subcontinent?s biggest entertainer, which is slated to see the who?s who of the corporate, cinema, political, cricket worlds pouring into watch the action on the field. And hundreds of millions of viewers in India and worldwide who will tune into their TV sets or online or on their handphones.