On the second day of bidding for TV and digital media rights of IPL cricket on Monday, the Indian cricket board, according to industry sources, bagged a whopping Rs. 44,075 crore for 410 matches.

Amidst rumours and, at times, some wild speculations on the successful bidders for the TV and digital rights for the Indian sub-continent region, it seems that the likely winners — yet to be officially announced — could be Max Culver (aka Sony Pictures Networks India) and Viacom18, which is backed by the Reliance Group and Uday Shankar-James Murdoch’s Bodhi Tree with the investors wanting to convert the media company into a digital-first outfit.

According to ANI, Package A (TV rights) was sold at Rs 23,575 crore, which is Rs 57.5 crore per match and Package B (Digital rights) selling for Rs 20,500 crore@ Rs 50 crore per match.

The ANI report went on to add, quoting unnamed sources, that there were two media houses who had won the bid for TV and digital rights. There were some reports that the winner of Package A did want to have a hard go at the digital rights too.

The media rights value has grown more than two and a half times than what Star India paid in the year 2017 for a composite TV+digital package.

This time the process was divided into a total of four packages (A, B, C and D). Package A is exclusive for TV (broadcast) for the Indian subcontinent while package B is for digital-only grouping for the same region.

Media reports also indicated — none of which could be independently confirmed by Indianbroadcastingworld.com — the bids war has now spilled over to the third day as package C ( rights for non-exclusive 18 games) overseas rights are yet to be decided.

The bidding, according to sources, for this Package C stopped at Rs 1,700 crore. The base price in this package per match was set at Rs 11 crore.

The current digital and television rights are held by Star India, now owned by Walt Disney Co, which paid 163.48 billion rupees ($2.09 billion) in 2017.