Cricket?s biggest festival, the Indian Premier League (IPL) III will not be restricted to television. It can also be viewed in theatres across the country. Moreover, IPL is also teaming up with Google?s YouTube so that viewers can watch the game live on the Internet. In a freewheeling conversation with FE?s Pritha Mitra Dasgupta and Priyanka Akhouri, Lalit Modi, chairman and commissioner of IPL believes he can take the gameall over the world and hopes to set up a few short games in western countries like the US by the end of the year.

What?s different about IPL III?

IPL 3 is different because this season we are in a partnership with Google, which allows viewing the game on YouTube. That?s a big decision, even bigger than the one to shift the game to South Africa. As a sports administrator, our job is to ensure that our product is available around the world. It will be hard to outdo this in IPL IV. Once we have our distribution channels in place, we needn?t worry because people will watch the game and the revenues will come in. Google plans to spend millions of dollars building bandwidth and the highway for us and we can ride on that without any barriers.

How did you manage to win the Google deal when others like the English Premier League or the Superbowl haven?t?

There are billions of cricket fans in India and half a billion around the world. Google was looking for different models to expand and wanted to experiment with us since we had a similar outlook.

This year, IPL is going multi-dimensional. So, how will team owners gain and monetise from this?

With IPL being available to you on Google, in theatres, on 3D and across the world, advertisers have an opportunity to push their brands.We should be able to monetise on this and the franchisees too will get a share of the spoils. I now feel that the base price of $225 million that I have decided for my new team has been a big mistake since there are negotiations for $1.2 billion or $1.3 billion for Manchester United. We are the only sporting league in the world where most of our teams have zero debt on the balance sheet.

What are your revenue expectations?

We feel the deals that are being put into place could be a multiplier. Fans can watch IPL matches from eight different feeds and also online on YouTube. One can download the games for some dollars, buy merchandise online and all these transactions can be monetised by the online partner. This will also reduce piracy as last year our biggest challenge was that 7,000 different feeds of IPLwere being pirated and broadcasters were losing money. With Google, this will not happen as it will insert the advertisements in the feeds. For a sports rights owner like us getting worldwide distribution and curbing piracy at one stroke is a dream come true. When this happens there will be automatic monetisation as we can now know the numbers people clicked through, how long they stayed at our site and also who came to the website.

Sony has said that it?s launching a sports property on the back of IPL. What do you have to say about it?

I think it?s great that a company like Sony is able to use IPL to launch a sports channel and this just shows the power of sports channels. We renegotiated the broadcasting deal last year although the first time we bought the rights everybody said that Sony may go under. We believe we made a big mistake by selling the rights to Sony at the price that we did but we?re happy that all our partners are making money.

Do you plan to take IPL to other international destinations?

We believe that the world has just opened for us and just as we would like to see Manchester United play exhibition matches around the world to build fan base, similarly, we too would like to have our fan base around the world.