iWorld
YuppTV ventures into fitness and wellbeing, partners with Brilliant Living TV
MUMBAI: YuppTV, the world’s leading OTT player for South-Asian content announced its plans of venturing into fitness and wellness space. The OTT leader will be partnering with Brilliant Living TV to spread the wave of fitness and wellbeing to millions of Indians living outside the country. Brilliant Wellness is India’s Largest content provider in the Fitness /Wellness genre.
The brand’s foray into fitness space with BLT will allow YuppTV viewers and fitness enthusiasts to get up close and personal with the celebrity fitness trainers and gain significant insights on fitness and nutrition. Coaching people to best achieve their fitness and wellbeing goals at any convenient time and place, these fitness trainers hail from diverse fields of Yoga, Meditation, Fitness, and Nutrition, and have, in the past, coached Bollywood celebrities like Katrina Kaif, Kareena Kapoor, Aamir Khan, and the likes.
Commenting on the latest endeavour, YuppTV, Founder and CEO, Uday Reddy said, “The sedentary lifestyles we have come to live these days are posing serious health hazards. People stand at the risk of being obese, suffer from fatigue, stress-related health disorders and others. To the same end, we decided to make fitness and wellness content available on our network channels, providing our users with an easy access to world-class health and fitness related content. We are further glad to partner with Brilliant Living TV and together provide high quality content to our viewers.”
On their association, BLT, CEO, Adarsh Gupta said “It has been our constant endeavour to bring everyday users closer to the best fitness and well-being practices that they can follow. To the same effect, we are glad to partner with YuppTV and make our stellar collection of fitness and nutrition coaching content available to YuppTV’s burgeoning global users. With the association, we intend to encourage users to practice healthy living, right in the comforts or their homes and hope that users will respond warmly to the latest offering.”
With this partnership, Users will be able to access high-quality fitness, nutrition, and well-being content right at the comforts of their homes on YuppTV’s TBO, KBO, BBO, MBO Channels. YuppTV will now have something to offer to all the fitness enthusiasts, right from yoga, calisthenics, weight-training, meditation, nutrition, and more.
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
