iWorld
Rajshri Entertainment MD & CEO Rajjat Barjatya no more
Mumbai: Rajjat Barjatya, the affable, soft-spoken managing director & CEO of Rajshri Entertainment, passed away Friday evening in Mumbai’s Jaslok Hospital. Rajjat had been battling a blood cancer relapse since end-March this year. He was 41 years old.
He was first detected with lymphoblastic leukemia in 2010. But he fought and conquered the life-threatening disease and had started aggressively expanding Rajshri in the digital space over the past couple of years. The dreaded disease resurfaced earlier this year.
He is survived by his wife Neha and two daughters, aged 11 and six.
Rajjat was a big votary of digital and online video and Rajshri Entertainment had emerged as amongst YouTube’s most preferred partners in India under his guidance.
Confirming the news, Jaslok Hospital CEO Dr Taran Gianchandani said that the death occurred at around 6:30 pm and refused to comment further.
According to sources, Rajat was supposed to travel to London next week for a bone marrow transplant. “He had been in and out of hospital over the past three weeks. In the ICU and out. On Thursday, he became quite serious and was put on the ventilator,” says a source close to family. “His body gave up the fight on Friday evening.”
His last rites will be performed on Saturday at Mumbai’s Worli Crematorium at 1 pm.
A cousin of renowned film maker Sooraj Barijatya and the son of Ajit Kumar Barjatya, Rajjat was also the founder & managing trustee of Rajshri Foundation, the non profit social enterprise of the Rajshri Group. He was actively involved in the Barjatya family’s Rajshri Productions, which has been behind family based movies such as Maine Pyar Kiya, Hum Apke Hain Kaun and the recent 2015 Salman Khan starrer Prem Ratan Dhan Payo.
May his soul rest in peace.
(Updated on 1 August 2016, 12:54 pm)
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.
