Financial Express report. A season earlier (IPL 9), it raked in ad revenues of Rs 1,200 crore, as per an Economic Times report. In IPL 8 it clocked in advertising revenues of Rs 1,000 crore.

Star India had won the global digital rights to IPL in 2015 for Rs 302.2 crore for a period of 3 years and beat Times Internet and Sony (Multi Screen Media).

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Star India too had also benefited from the windfall from IPL as it had the digital rights over the last three years. The company was estimated to earned Rs 200 crore advertising revenue from IPL 10 on Hotstar and its digital streaming properties, due to huge growth in viewership on digital, according to a Live Mint report.

What is more interesting is that in IPL 10, for the first time, viewership on Hotstar surpassed the viewership on television in the first two weeks. Hotstar clocked in a viewership of 36.4 million as compared with 34.9 million viewership on television, according to a TOI report.

Digital rights for IPL received the maximum competition with five bidders. including Facebook, Airtel, Reliance Jio and Times Internet bidding.

While Facebook bid the highest for the digital rights of IPL with a bid of Rs 3,900 crore, but it was not enough to win the rights.

In fact, Star India's bid for the digital rights was the lowest at Rs 1,443 crore. In comparison, Airtel bid Rs 3,280 crore, followed by Reliance Jio's bid of Rs 3,075.72 crore and Times Internet's bid of Rs 1,787.50 crore.

However, while Facebook and the others failed to get rights ,BCCI awarded the media rights television and digital to the highest consolidated bidder. A reason why Star India won the digital rights.

Despite this, Facebook's bid is significant as it outlines the internet giants strategy in the Indian market. 

The company has been looking to become a go-to platform for live streaming of sports around the world.

It currently streams UEFA Champions League games on Facebook Live in the US, it has signed separate deals to stream Major League Soccer matches in the US, MLB games and World Surf League events.

Winning the IPL digital rights would have catapulted Facebook as a live streaming destination and would be even mean a huge hike in its advertising rates in India. This could further see its growth and dominance in the country.

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