iWorld
Reliance Big Entertainment & FunOnGo ink deal for mobile entertainment content
MUMBAI: The ubiquitous nature of mobile phones has created a significant opportunity for monetization of video content on mobile Internet devices. Towards this objective Reliance Big Entertainment has entered into a strategic alliance with FunOnGo Entertainment, which provides customized platform and managed services.
FunOnGo is a content curator and licenses VAS content across movies, music, games and applications. The strategic alliance will focus on servicing Indian mobile handset brands. Across all its OEM clients such as Samsung, Micromax, Karbonn, Intex & Gionee, FunOnGo has the potential to reach 60 per cent of smartphone users in India.
Handset vendors are moving from hardware specifications to focus on the user experience as a way to improve market penetration. FunOnGo helps OEMs set up on-device portals that allow users to easily browse, purchase and use content and services.
Reliance Big Entertainment COO Sweta Agnihotri said, “We see the mobile phone brands as a fantastic gateway to the consumer. Our team will play an active operational role in this alliance wherein FunOnGo could leverage our understanding of content and industry relationships to amplify its value offering to the consumer.”
FunOnGo CEO Vijay Singh added, “Until recently, the revenues generated through mobile came from on-deck services offered by telecom companies. Globally, the trend has shifted towards growth of off-deck services that are offered directly to consumers.”
Maitreya Mass Media is a seed investor of FunOnGo & has business interests as wide-ranging as FMCG, hospitality, real estate and mass communication.
Maitreya Mass Media MD Varsha Satpalkar said, “The all-round growth on mobile be it devices, connections, traffic and content consumption, is astounding and we see that FunOnGo is rightly poised to gain from the momentum this ecosystem provides.”
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.
