Gaming
Gizmobaba joins hands with Franchise India to get a national presence
MUMBAI: Gizmobaba – Portal for innovative gadgets and gizmos – is looking for rapid expansions. In order to expand its national penetration, the portal has joined hands with Franchise India, one of Asia’s leading franchise and retail management consultancy.
By partnering with Franchise India, Gizmobaba is aiming to cross the penetration phase and get into the fast track growth phase. Gizmobaba.com was established in 2012, looking at fulfilling the needs of Indian consumers looking for the latest innovative gadgets and gizmos. Parallel to electronic industry growth, ecommerce has emerged as one of the biggest platform to sell gadgets.
Gizmobaba managing director Alok Chawla exults: “The brand has aggressive growth plans and intends to approach a standardised and benchmarked franchise strategy – A sustainable format for future growth that eases out operations, and ensures faster growth and a large brand presence. Thus, we have approached the business through a standardised franchise strategy on the basis of industry norms.”
Franchise India chairman Gaurav Marya asserts: “Considering the ‘Gizmobaba’ business model and the Industry, we have strategized a Franchise approach, UNIT Franchise which is a feasible option at this growth phase and the approach of Multi-Unit Franchise will be considered at the penetration phase of newer markets. Property should be ideally a Kiosk at a low rental place, but visibility factor should be considered.”
He further added, “We feel there exists high opportunity for the fantastic innovative products in the given segment offered by Gizmobaba and there is a shortage of such concepts which are customised as per end consumer needs. However, the model is most suitable with the franchise owned and franchise operated model targeting the tier-II and tier-III cities in the initial phase.”
Franchise India uses a stage wise approach has been formulated with the objective to create more realistic approach to franchising for the Gizmobaba business.
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
