Facebook bid $610 million for the rights to stream Indian cricket matches

• Alex Heath
 

• Sep. 5, 2017, 10:44 AM
• 3,646
 

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Facebook is willing to pay lots of money for sports.

That much is evident by the company's roughly $610 million bid for the rights to stream five years of games from the Indian Premier League, the most popular cricket league in the world.

The IPL announced that 21st Century Fox's Star India won exclusive streaming rights with a $2.5 billion bid on Monday. Facebook posted the second-highest bid. A Facebook representative confirmed to Business Insider that the company bid on the rights but declined to comment further.

Even though Facebook didn't win the rights, its hefty bid shows how much it's willing to pay for sports now that it has its new Watch hub for live, scripted, and episodic video.

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During Facebook's first-quarter earnings call earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would try licensing sports games with the goal of "creating some anchor content" that teaches people to think of Facebook as a destination for premium video.

Facebook eventually wants all of its shows and content deals to move to an ad-revenue-sharing model, but right now it's clearly comfortable spending money upfront — even hundreds of millions of dollars — to secure streaming rights for marquee content.

SEE ALSO: Facebook is said to have withdrawn its bid to stream big NFL games

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ROBERT SHILLER: Bitcoin is the 'best example right now' of a bubble

• Akin Oyedele
 

• Sep. 5, 2017, 11:13 AM
• 18,706

Robert Shiller. Wendy Carlson/Getty Images

Robert Shiller, the Nobel-winning author who predicted the two biggest speculative markets in recent history, is repeating that bitcoin is in a bubble.

The cryptocurrency is "the best example right now," Shiller told Quartz's John Detrixhe in an interview published Tuesday. In January 2014 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he called the cryptocurrency "an amazing example of a bubble," adding that there was "no question about it."

Bitcoin has exploded in price and popularity since then. Bitcoin was at $4,337 on Tuesday, or about 442% over its price in January 2014 of about $800 a coin.

For evidence that bitcoin is in a bubble, Shiller pointed to "a fundamental deep angst of our digitization and computers, that people wonder what their place is in this new world." That fear gives some people a sense that they know the future and can profit from it, he told Quartz.

It's the same kind of angst that President Donald Trump addressed while he was campaigning, Shiller said.

Shiller's "Irrational Exuberance" is a seminal book that forecast the tech-stock and housing crashes and outlined the investor behavior that created both bubbles. The speed of bitcoin's rally has far outpaced most recent bubbles, as the chart below shows:

Jeffrey Kleintop/Charles Schwab

Shiller also told Quartz that there were "aspects of a housing bubble and a stock-market bubble right now." The cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio that he popularized shows that stocks are the most expensive since the tech bubble collapsed in 2000.

Head over to Quartz for the full interview »

Get the latest Bitcoin price here.

SEE ALSO: Bitcoin's 'bubble' is unlike anything we've ever seen before

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NOW WATCH: GARY SHILLING: No one is making impulse buys online

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More: Bitcoin Bubbles Robert Shiller