Zee Entertainment Enterprises, the Indian media conglomerate, has now filed a counterclaim for around $8 million (plus interest) against pay-TV giant Star India, as a dispute around major cricket rights during the 2024-27 cycle shows no signs of abating.
The counterclaim comes in response to Star’s initial legal thrust against Zee, in which the broadcaster (now part-owned by Reliance Industries) filed a damages claim of $940 million against Zee in early 2024. That latter claim is currently being assessed by the London Court of Criminal Arbitration.
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The issue stems from a deal the two parties originally struck in August 2022, through which Star was meant to have granted exclusive sub-licensing rights for linear TV to Zee for all International Cricket Council (ICC) events during the 2024-27 cycle. India is cricket's biggest and most passionate market, and media rights in that sport are highly sought-after.
The deal between Star and Zee would have seen the former network license out a package of rights to men’s ICC events during the 2024-27 cycle to Zee, across linear TV only – Star, the ICC rightsholder, would have retained digital rights to those events.
The ICC, in its original bidding documents for Indian media rights (which were eventually snapped up by Star for around $3 billion), had included a provision in its bid document that allowed the winner to sub-license a package out to another party.
However, since a planned merger between Zee and the Sony Pictures Networks (SPN) operation fell through last January, there has been legal wrangling between the two. Star has repeatedly stated that Zee owes money for breach of contract, to the tune of $203 million, while the sub-licensing deal between the pair was formally terminated last June.
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By GlobalDataThis came after Star began arbitration proceedings in March, asking Zee to fulfill its contractual obligations or compensate the broadcaster for damages caused.
Zee, meanwhile, was looking to extricate itself from the Star sub-licensing deal since the SPN merger fell through. It was reported at that point that the payment due to Star for the licensing of rights was intrinsically linked to the merger going ahead.
The merger, which would have been worth around $10 billion, would have combined over 75 linear TV channels and their respective streaming platforms.
India is set to co-host the men’s T20 World Cup in 2026, while other men’s events in the 2024-27 cycle include the 2025 ICC Champions Trophy (Pakistan), and the 2027 World Cup (South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia).
The ICC men’s Cricket World Cup in India in late 2023 was covered under Star’s previous deal with the ICC, which ran between 2015 and the end of that year.
The men's T20 World Cup in mid-2024 (split between the Caribbean and the US), meanwhile, was available – through the new deal – on Star's linear networks and its streaming platform Hotstar.
