Canadian Firm Live Current Media Bags Indian Cricket League's Online Rights For $50 Million
This story was written by Nikhil Pahwa.
Live Current Media Inc (LCM), a Vancouver, Canada based company has bagged the portal rights of the Indian Premier League for 10 years for $50 million, we have confirmed from sources. LCM owns the domain Cricket.com, and intends to develop it as a portal around the IPL. An Indian company may also be involved with the portal. We believe that live streaming rights are not a part of the deal since those are being sold separately - Willow TV has got rights for streaming content in the Americas. $50 million for just the portal rights may seem high, but these are exclusive, and come at the cost of preventing other websites access to the IPL. As per reports, LCM had recently rejected a $6 million offer for the domain Cricket.com.
Earlier known as Communicate.com, LCM used to be a domain name company. They stopped selling their domain name portfolio, and began using the domains as commerce sites. As per our sister site paidContent.org, around 90 percent of their revenue came from one e-commerce site - Perfume.com. The company owns 1100 domains, including Boxing.com, Brazil.com, Vietnam.com and importers.com, among others.
LCM also bought a fantasy Cricket Facebook application for $25,000 (plus a bonus of $10,000 if targets are met), according to a filing with the SEC. At present, there are three fantasy cricket applications on Facebook.
By Nikhil Pahwa