Facebook Inc. underlined how serious its video streaming ambitions are with the news Monday that it made a failed bid to secure the digital live streaming rights to the Indian Premier League cricket tournament, one of the highest-profile cricket events in the world.

The social media giant put in a $600 million bid to secure the rights, only to see the contract awarded to Indian TV company Star India instead. Facebook’s bid for just the digital rights for streaming IPL within India for a period of five years was reportedly the highest that was received.  But its bid was bested by Star India, which made a combined $2.5 billion bid for worldwide digital and TV rights.

Cricket is extremely big business in India. As India’s national sport, it boasts TV audiences for the IPL often exceeding 50 million viewers. Digital audiences are massive too, and many companies see the sport as a way to break into India’s markets. For example, Intel Corp. launched a cricket bat speed-tracking device in India last May, also hinting at its plans to create new ways for viewers to experience matches in virtual reality.

Live sports streaming is proving to be a popular concept with tech companies in general as they look to reach out to new audiences. Amazon.com Inc. and Twitter Inc. have both managed to secure the rights to livestream a number of NFL matches on Thursday nights, for example. Amazon and Twitter was also said to have expressed an interest in bidding for the IPL rights, though ultimately neither company tendered a bid.

Here are the final figures for IPL Media Rights for the period from 2018-2022. #IPLMediaRights pic.twitter.com/2y1m0X4701

— IndianPremierLeague (@IPL) Sept. 4, 2017

“We know that live sports events create social media highlights and traffic,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president, Constellation Research Inc. Mueller explained that with sports playing such a big part of many people’s lives, it makes sense that social media companies such as Facebook would want access to this kind of content.

“The cricket move is actually a smart one from a global perspective, as one of the traditionally underrepresented sports in TV distribution,” he added. “That’s where Facebook’s opportunity lies, with live sports events with global reach that can’t be seen on TV easily, that can draw massive online audiences, create social stickiness and present a great opportunity to sell advertisements and sign up new users.”

Facebook may well have been planning to use India as a kind of testbed for the idea – earlier this year the social media firm livestreamed a regular-season NBA match between the Golden State Warriors and the Sacramento Kings for the first time, but the stream was only accessible to viewers in India.

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