As anticipated, the political masters of Pakistan have finally directed its national cricket team to lift the boycott and play India on 15 February, 2026, as scheduled in Colombo . The Masters must've thought the money at stake is too lucrative to continue indulging in such kind of grumpy politics. Of course, they had imposed some pre-conditions that included making the 'handshake' a mandatory protocol, but the ICC looked the other way. So, the PCB takes it as protecting the 'spirit of cricket'. The Indian cricket board , the sponsors, the TV channels and millions of fans who do not necessarily mix patriotism with sports, if it's cricket in particular, must be deliriously ecstatic that all the revenues and hype and excitement shall be there for harvest thr oughout the ICC Men's T20 World Cup-2026 , co-hosted by India and Sri Lanka . Most of the Indians fans must also be ecstatic to have their heroes go on vanquishing the enemy neighbor and humiliating t...
It seems, reasonably enough, that the outrage was waiting to happen. The growth of the Over-the-top media services platforms (OTT) that distribute video streaming over the internet, has been tremendous in the last eight years in India; in 2018 its market worth was more than INR 21.5 billion which has grown to INR 35 billion in 2019 and it is around INR 40 billion now. The market worth is expected to grow at the exponential rate of 45% to reach around INR 138 billion in 2023 and over 158 billion in 2024. The platforms enjoy a viewership of more than 1.7 billion subscribers currently which is likely to rise to a whopping 5 billion this year, making it the second-biggest OTT market after the US. Except for Reliance Entertainment’s launch of BigFix in 2008, the biggest of the 40-odd OTT platforms like SonyLIV, Disney-Hotstar, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Voot, JioCinema and Zee5 started operations in India during 2013-18. Initially, the OTT platforms were streaming released feature ...