iWorld
dittoTV partners Idea to provide 90+ live channels
MUMBAI: Zee Digital Convergence Limited’s (ZDCL) live TV platform dittoTV has partnered with Idea Cellular for its entertainment app, Idea Movies Club. Through this, Idea subscribers will get access to a bouquet of 90+ premium live TV channels. Idea Cellular will also offer its subscribers a subscription of dittoTV bundled with its data recharges and Movie Club packs.
Idea Movie Club is a free video streaming app offering unlimited access to music videos, movies and Hollywood, Bollywood and regional TV shows across 10+ different languages. The live TV channels offered by the app can be accessed via ditto TV, which is featured as a separate tab in the app.
“With dittoTV, our aim is to bring Live TV within the reach of every Indian and help them access a rich portfolio of content across genres and languages. With this collaboration, Idea customers can watch their favorite TV shows live anytime, anywhere, on any internet enabled device, along with all the other wonderful video and movies content offered by the Idea Movie Club app. This is a fantastic option especially for working professionals who are constantly on-the-go and hostel students who may not have easy access to a TV set and would otherwise miss out on their favorite programmes,” said dittoTV business head Archana Anand.
Positioned as Desh ka TV, dittoTV has several strategic partnerships in place to strengthen its reach across the country. dittoTV is available to users on both Android and iOS platforms. The subscription charges for the platform start from INR 20 per month.
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.
