When to watch the IPL 2026

• The 2026 Indian Premier League season runs from Saturday, March 28, until Sunday, May 31.

Where to watch the IPL 2026

• Indian Premier League matches will air in the US on Willow TV.

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Watch the 2026 T20 World Cup in the UK from £15

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The 19th edition of the world’s richest cricket tournament gets underway this weekend, with Virat Kohli’s defending champs Royal Challengers Bengaluru taking on Sunrisers Hyderabad in the opening game of the new Indian Premier League season on Saturday.

Among the big talking points in the run-up to the new campaign is Kolkata Knight Riders’ heavy investment in Cameron Green. The Australian all-rounder became the most expensive overseas signing in IPL history after being bought for $2.7 million by KKR in the 2026 auction. Chennai Super Kings will meanwhile be hoping for a huge improvement after their worst-ever season in 2025, with Ruturaj Gaikwad taking over as captain from MS Dhoni.

The 2026 edition of the IPL also looks set to herald the arrival of a new cricketing superstar, with 15-year-old Vaibhav Suryavanshi widely tipped to shine for Rajasthan Royals.

Elsewhere, the new term brings a slight format change, with a modified group stage where teams now play opponents from their own group once and the opposite group twice.

The 2026 Indian Premier League season starts on Saturday, March 28, with the match between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Sunrisers Hyderabad, and ends with the final on Sunday, May 31. A full schedule can be found on the official Indian Premier League website. 

How to watch the 2026 IPL season online from anywhere using a VPN

If you’re traveling abroad and want to keep up with the action from the Indian Premier League while away from home, a VPN can help enhance your privacy and security when streaming.   

It encrypts your traffic and prevents your internet service provider from throttling your speeds, and can also be helpful when connecting to public Wi-Fi networks while traveling, adding an extra layer of protection for your devices and logins. VPNs are legal in many countries, including the US and Canada, and can be used for legitimate purposes such as improving online privacy and security.  

However, some streaming services may have policies that restrict VPN use to access region-specific content. If you’re considering a VPN for streaming, check the platform’s terms of service to ensure compliance.   

If you choose to use a VPN, follow the provider’s installation instructions, ensuring you’re connected securely and in compliance with applicable laws and service agreements. Some streaming platforms may block access when a VPN is detected, so verify whether your streaming subscription allows VPN use.  

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Livestream the Indian Premier League season in the US and Canada

The 2026 T20 World Cup final is being broadcast live in North America on the cricket streaming service Willow TV.

A direct Willow TV subscription is available in the US for $10 per month or $80 per year, allowing you to watch a wide range of matches from around the world via your browser or the service’s very own app.

The dedicated cricket-streaming service is also available from various cable providers, including Spectrum, Dish and Xfinity as well as OTT providers Sling TV (via its Desi Binge Plus or Dakshin Flex plans) and Fubo (via an add-on).

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Livestream the IPL 2026 in India

This year’s IPL is being televised on Star Sports linear channels in India, and can be livestreamed via JioHotstar.

JioHotstar is available in three different tiers. The streaming service’s Mobile plan currently costs Rs 79. The new Super Plan (Ads, 2 Devices, 1080p) will meanwhile set you back Rs 149 per month, while the top tier Premium Plan (Ad-Free, 4 Devices, 4K, Includes Hollywood) is now priced at Rs 299 per month.

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Watch the Indian Premier League in the UK

Live coverage of Sunday’s final is exclusive to Sky Sports in the UK and will be broadcast on its Sky Sports cricket channel. If you already have Sky Sports as part of your TV package, you can stream the tournament via its Sky Go app, but cord-cutters will want to set up a Now account and a Now Sports membership to stream the game. 

Sky subsidiary Now offers streaming access to Sky Sports channels with a Now Sports membership. You can get a day of access for £15, or sign up to a monthly plan from £35 per month right now.

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Livestream the Indian Premier League in South Africa 

In South Africa, IPL matches are being broadcast live this season on SuperSport. 

If you can’t watch on your TV, you can also watch via the network’s streaming service for PC and Mac, as well as via SuperSport’s mobile app.

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Pay TV network SuperSport boasts exclusive live coverage of Indian Premier League matches in South Africa.

The main ways to stream SuperSport is through DStv Stream Premium which currently costs R799 per month.

Stream the Indian Premier League in Australia

Cricket fans Down Under can watch Indian Premier League action on Fox Sports via Foxtel. If you’re not a Fox subscriber, your best option is to sign up for the streaming service Kayo Sports.  

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A Kayo Sports subscription starts at AU$30 a month and lets you stream on one screen, while its Premium tier costs AU$46 a month for simultaneous viewing on up to three devices.

The service gives you access to a wide range of sports, including F1, NRL, NFL, NHL and MLB, and there are no lock-in contracts.

Better still, if you’re a new customer, you can take advantage of a one-week Kayo Sports free trial.

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Stream the Indian Premier League in New Zealand

Cricket fans in New Zealand looking to cheer on the Black Caps in Sunday’s final will need a subscription to pay-TV broadcaster Sky Sport, which has the broadcast rights to show the T20 World Cup live.

Pay-TV broadcaster Sky Sport will be showing the T20 World Cup final live in New Zealand. That also means you can also watch every game online using the network’s Sky Go streaming service.

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Cord-cutters can opt for the online-only Sky Sport Now service, which costs $30 for a weekly pass, $55 for the monthly option, or $550 for a full year of viewing.

Physical Intelligence, the two-year-old San Francisco robotics startup, is in discussions to raise about $1 billion in new funding at a valuation exceeding $11 billion, according to Bloomberg. The deal would effectively double the company’s $5.6 billion valuation in just four months.

Founders Fund is set to participate with Lightspeed Venture Partners also in talks to invest alongside returning backers Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, Bloomberg reported. The deal is still in early stages and details could change, noted the outlet.

TechCrunch visited Physical Intelligence’s headquarters in January, where co-founder Sergey Levine described the company’s ambition simply: “Think of it like ChatGPT, but for robots.” At the time, the company had raised just over $1 billion and employed about 80 people working to build general-purpose AI models that can power robots to perform a wide variety of tasks, from folding laundry to peeling vegetables.

Co-founder Lachy Groom told TechCrunch the company has no timeline for commercialization, an unusual posture that its investors don’t seem to mind. “There’s no limit to how much money we can really put to work,” Groom said. “There’s always more compute you can throw at the problem.”

from the it-was-always-a-shakedown dept

Remember when Elon Musk told advertisers to “go fuck” themselves and then sued them for the crime of taking his advice? A federal judge has now dismissed that lawsuit — with prejudice — confirming what anyone with a passing familiarity with antitrust law already knew: companies deciding they don’t want their brands plastered next to extremist content aren’t engaged in an illegal conspiracy. They’re just making basic (probably pretty smart) business decisions.

When X Corp filed this case back in August of 2024, we walked through in great detail why the legal theory was fundamentally broken. Not broken in a “they pleaded it badly” kind of way, but broken in a “this theory does not describe an antitrust violation no matter how many drugs you’re taking or how convinced you are that the world owes you advertising dollars” kind of way. Judge Jane Boyle of the Northern District of Texas has now agreed, and the key section of her ruling is worth reading in full, because it says what we said at the outset: X has not suffered antitrust injury.

The court laid out the standard, quoting the Fifth Circuit, channeling the Supreme Court, on what counts as an antitrust injury:

The Supreme Court has distilled antitrust injury as being “injury of the type the antitrust laws were intended to prevent and that flows from that which makes defendants’ acts unlawful.” … “The antitrust laws … were enacted for ‘the protection of competition not competitors.’” … “Typical” antitrust injury thus “include[s] increased prices and decreased output.” … “This circuit has narrowly interpreted the meaning of antitrust injury, excluding from it the threat of decreased competition.” … “Loss from competition itself—that is, loss in the form of customers[] choosing the competitor’s goods and services over the plaintiff’s—does not constitute an antitrust injury.” … In short, the question underlying antitrust injury is whether consumers—not competitors—have been harmed.

Antitrust law protects competition, not competitors. X’s entire argument boiled down to: “advertisers chose to spend their money somewhere other than our platform, and that hurt us.” But that’s just… the market. That’s how markets work. Customers choosing not to buy from you because they don’t like what you’re selling has never been an antitrust violation, and the court made short work of explaining why.

Amusingly, the GOP — whose campaigns Musk has bankrolled extensively — spent decades pushing for exactly this narrow definition of antitrust injury, precisely to make cases like this harder to bring. Perhaps one of those politicians could have mentioned that before Elon filed.

But this case was never actually about winning an antitrust case. It was a warning shot at advertisers: give Elon your money or we’ll drag you through an expensive court process. A shakedown dressed up in legal filings. Indeed, after the lawsuit was filed, it was reported that part of X’s “sales” process was to threaten companies that they’d be added to the lawsuit if they didn’t advertise on the platform.

The court examined X’s theory from two different angles, and it failed both times. First, if the conspiracy was supposed to benefit competing social media platforms (like Pinterest, one of the defendants), X hadn’t alleged that any competitor was actually behind the boycott or pressuring advertisers to exclude X so the competitor could corner the market:

X has not alleged that the advertisers chose to do business with Pinterest—or any other social media company—as part of an agreement not to do business with X. Unlike the large hospital in Doctor’s Hospital, Pinterest is not alleged to be X’s competitor that wanted to exclude X from the market so that it could charge higher prices. In turn, unlike the network in Doctor’s Hospital, the advertisers did not decide to boycott X at Pinterest’s—or any other X competitor’s—behest to secure the competitor’s business. Instead, X alleges a conspiracy driven by advertisers not to further X-competitor social media companies’ interests but to pursue their own collective interests as to where they place their advertisements.

Second, if the conspiracy was supposed to eliminate competition at the advertiser level, the court found that GARM wasn’t acting as some kind of gatekeeper blocking X from accessing customers. It was just… advertisers deciding for themselves:

GARM is not an economic intermediary like the retailers in Eastern States. GARM did not buy advertising space from X to sell to advertisers nor did it, in such an arrangement, tell X not to sell directly to GARM’s customers. Rather, GARM was organized by advertisers and reflected their “avowed commitment to furthering [their] economic interests . . . as a group.” … Thus, if GARM is the obstacle to X reaching its advertiser-customers directly, then it is the equivalent of the advertiser-customers themselves deciding not to deal.

That’s the ballgame. Advertisers collectively deciding they don’t want to spend money on your platform — especially after you’ve told them to go fuck themselves and your platform has become a haven for content that damages their brands — just doesn’t state an antitrust claim. Imagine being so entitled that when the marketplace rejects your offering, you insist that it must be an antitrust attack on your rights to their money?

The court was so confident in this conclusion that it dismissed the case with prejudice and denied X the opportunity to replead, noting that the 165-paragraph complaint was already plenty detailed:

The 165-paragraph Second Amended Complaint contains no dearth of detail: if facts existed that GARM operated at an X competitor’s behest to put X out of business or that GARM advertisers sought to unfairly exclude competing advertisers from doing business, X would have pleaded those facts. The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the Court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice.

When a court tells you the nature of your theory doesn’t work, that’s about as definitive a loss as you can get.

As we noted when the case was filed, the evidence X submitted in its own complaint actually undermined the case. One of X’s own exhibits showed GARM’s lead, Rob Rakowitz, explicitly telling an advertiser that GARM doesn’t make recommendations and that advertising decisions are “completely within the sphere of each member and subject to their own discretion.” Another email showed Rakowitz telling an advertiser asking about Twitter that “you may want to connect with Twitter directly to understand their progress on brand safety and make your own decisions.” This is the supposedly nefarious conspiracy that X spent years and untold legal fees litigating.

Separately, I have to mention the blatant forum shopping: X filed this case in the Wichita Falls Division of the Northern District of Texas, which was widely understood as a transparent attempt to land in front of Judge Reed O’Connor, known for partisan rulings and already presiding over Elon’s SLAPP suit against Media Matters. That didn’t work out — O’Connor recused himself, not because of his ownership of Tesla stock, but rather his ownership of some advertising firms who were defendants. The case got reassigned to Judge Boyle, and X still lost. In an ironic twist, X then tried to transfer the case to the Southern District of New York, only to have the court deny that motion because X couldn’t even prove they did business in that specific district. So X handpicked a forum, lost its judge, and then couldn’t escape to a different one. Great lawyering.

But the legal dismissal, satisfying as it is, doesn’t capture the most important part of what actually happened here. Because while the court correctly found that X suffered no antitrust injury, GARM itself suffered a very real injury: it was killed.

GARM shut down within days of the lawsuit being filed, following Rep. Jim Jordan’s misleading congressional investigation that painted the organization as some kind of anti-conservative censorship machine. Jordan’s pressure campaign, combined with the threat of expensive litigation from the world’s richest man, made it untenable for GARM to continue operating. The organization that existed to help advertisers make informed decisions about brand safety — a fundamentally expressive activity, protected by the First Amendment — was destroyed through government jawboning and litigation threats.

There was only one attack on free speech involved here and it came from Jim Jordan and Elon Musk, not GARM or its advertiser members.

X filed this lawsuit wrapped in the language of free speech. Former X CEO Linda Yaccarino literally wore a necklace that said “free speech” while announcing the case, claiming that advertisers not giving X money was somehow an attack on users’ ability to express themselves. The actual speech suppression ran the other direction entirely. A private organization exercising its speech rights to help its members make informed business decisions was bullied out of existence through a combination of congressional intimidation and frivolous litigation.

Jordan celebrated GARM’s dissolution as a victory for free speech — par for the course for the censorial MAGA GOP. A congressman used the weight of his office to pressure a private organization into shutting down, and called that free speech. Meanwhile, the lawsuit that was part of that same ecosystem of intimidation has now been found to have no legal merit whatsoever.

This is what actual jawboning looks like in practice. The lawsuit didn’t need to succeed to accomplish its goal. GARM is gone. The organization that facilitated conversations among advertisers about how to protect their brands has been silenced. The chilling effect on any future organization that might want to do something similar is obvious and intentional. Any industry group that tries to coordinate around brand safety now knows that it might face a billionaire-funded lawsuit and a congressional investigation for its trouble.

The court’s ruling is a vindication of basic antitrust law. But the more important point is about what the actual free speech dynamics were in this whole saga.

X can appeal, of course, and given that this falls within the Fifth Circuit, stranger things have happened. But the fundamental problem remains what it’s always been: the theory that advertisers owe you their business because you exist, and that organizing around brand safety is a criminal conspiracy, has never been a viable legal argument. The court said so plainly. Dismissed with prejudice. Nothing to fix, because the whole premise was broken from the start.

Filed Under: advertising, antitrust, boycott, elon musk, free market, jim jordan, linda yaccarino, marketplace of ideas, shakedown

Companies: garm, wfa, x

• AI reduces fraud setup time from hours to minutes globally
• Scam success rates increase sharply within the first day of contact
• Deepfake tools strengthen credibility across complex multi-stage fraud operations

Financial fraud has expanded into a high-volume global activity, with losses estimated at over $400 billion within a single year.

According to Vyntra’s 2026 report, nearly two-thirds of scams succeed within a day of first contact, leaving little opportunity for intervention once engagement begins.

In a landmark case, a jury found this week that Meta and YouTube negligently designed their platforms and harmed the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman referred to as Kaley G.M. The jury agreed with the plaintiff that social media is addictive and harmful and was deliberately designed to be that way. This finding aligns with my view as a clinical psychologist: that social media addiction is not a failure of users, but a feature of the platforms themselves. I believe that accountability must extend beyond individuals to the systems and incentives that shape their behavior.

In my clinical practice, I regularly see patients struggling with compulsive social media use. Many describe a pattern of “doomscrolling,” often using social media to numb themselves after a long day. Afterwards, they feel guilty and stressed about the time lost yet have had limited success changing this pattern on their own.

It’s easy to understand why scrolling can be so addictive. Social media interfaces are built around a powerful behavioral mechanism known as intermittent reinforcement, says Judson Brewer, an addiction researcher at Brown University, which is the strongest and most effective type of reinforcement learning. This is the same mechanism that slot machines rely on: Users never know when the next reward—a shower of quarters, or a slew of likes and comments—will appear. Not all the videos in our feeds captivate us, but if we scroll long enough, we are bound to arrive at one that does. The ongoing search for rewards ensnares us and reinforces itself.

Why Social Media Feels Addictive

Individuals typically struggle on their own to address compulsive social media use. This should be no surprise, as habits are not typically broken through sheer discipline but rather by altering the reinforcement loops that sustain them. Brewer argues that “there’s actually no neuroscientific evidence for the presence of willpower.” Placing the burden to self-regulate solely on users misses the deeper issue: These platforms are engineered to override individual control.

A growing body of research identifies social media use and constant digital connectivity as important influences on the growing incidence of adolescent mental health problems. Brewer notes that adolescents are particularly vulnerable, as they are in a “developmental phase” in which reinforcement learning processes are especially strong. This vulnerability can be exploited by the design features of large social media platforms.

How Platforms Are Designed to Maximize Engagement

NPR uncovered records from a recent lawsuit filed by Kentucky’s attorney general against TikTok. According to these documents, TikTok implemented interface mechanisms such as autoplay, infinite scrolling, and a highly personalized recommendation algorithm that were systematically optimized to maximize user engagement.

TikTok’s algorithmically tailored “For You” content continuously tracks user behaviors, such as how long a video is watched, whether it is replayed, or quickly skipped. The feed then curates short videos, or reels, for the user based on past scrolling behavior and what is most likely to hold attention.

These documents show one example of a tech company knowingly designing products to maximize attention. I believe social media companies also have the capacity to reduce addictiveness through intentional design choices.

How Governments Are Regulating Social Media

The good news is we are not helpless. There are multiple levers for change: how we collectively talk about social media, how our governments regulate its design and access, and how we hold companies accountable for practices that shape user behavior.

Some countries are moving quickly to set policy around social media use. Australia has imposed a minimum age of 16 for social media accounts, with similar bans pending in Denmark, France, and Malaysia.

These bans typically rely on age verification. Users without verified accounts can still passively watch videos on platforms like YouTube, but this approach removes many of the most addictive features, including infinite scroll, personalized feeds, notifications, and systems for followers and likes. At the same time, age verification may cause different problems in the online ecosystem.

Other countries are targeting social media use in specific contexts. South Korea, for example, banned smartphone use in classrooms. And the United Kingdom is taking a different approach; its Age Appropriate Design Code instructs platforms to prioritize children’s safety while designing products. The code includes strong privacy defaults, limits on data collection, and constraints on features that nudge users toward greater engagement.

How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned

A report called Breaking the Algorithm, from Mental Health America, argues that social media platforms should shift from maximizing engagement to supporting well-being. It calls for revamping recommendation systems to spot patterns of unhealthy use and adjusting feeds accordingly—for example, by limiting extreme or distressing content.

The report also argues that users should not have to intentionally opt out of harmful design features. Instead, the safest settings should be the default. The report supports regulatory measures aimed at limiting features such as autoplay and infinite scroll while enforcing privacy and safety settings.

Platforms could also give users more control by adding natural speed bumps, such as stopping points or break reminders during scrolling. Research shows that interrupting infinite scroll with prompts such as “Do you want to keep going?” substantially reduces mindless scrolling and improves memory of content.

Some social media platforms are already experimenting with more ethical engagement. Mastodon, an open-source, decentralized platform, displays posts chronologically rather than ranking them for engagement, and does not offer algorithmically generated feeds like “For You.” Bluesky gives users control by letting them customize their own algorithms and toggle between different feed types, such as chronological or topic-based filters.

In light of the recent verdict, it is time for a national conversation about accountability for social media companies. Individual responsibility will always be important, but so are the mechanisms employed by big tech to shape user behavior. If social media platforms are currently designed to capture attention, they can also be designed to give some of it back.

The cybersecurity industry needs to ‘fight fire with fire’ when it comes to AI, according to Integrity360’s Brian Martin.

Earlier this month, cybersecurity company Integrity360 held the Dublin edition of its global cyber conference, Security First.

Held on 10 March, the conference saw cybersecurity experts and companies from across the country flock to the Aviva Stadium to sit in on a number of keynotes and panels, all exploring a wide variety of pressing cyber topics and trends.

Richard Ford, CTO at Integrity360, told SiliconRepublic.com at the Aviva that the Security First series of events provides an opportunity to bring some thought leaders from across the cyber industry together.

“From inside Integrity as well, but also from across industry because I think it’s important to get multiple voices,” he said.

But what does ‘security first’ mean?

Ford told us that the term refers to Integrity360’s model and view of cybersecurity, which is “to enable organisations to look at the full life cycle of cybersecurity, and look at it holistically, rather than just looking at one single segment”.

He explained that cybersecurity needs to be a whole-of-organisation priority, rather than just an IT concern.

“You know, it can’t just be a technology, it can’t be the technologists, the analysts, the engineers. It has to come from the very top of the organisation to think, actually, cybersecurity is important, it’s one of our key risks to our business,” he said.

“So we need to take that seriously and put the right effort, the right spend and the right focus on it to make sure that we are not the next organisation to be in the headlines and get breached.”

Human-AI era

This year, the conference theme was ‘Resilience Redefined: Securing the Human-AI Era’, with the event examining “how AI, machine identities and changing regulations are reshaping organisational defence”, according to the company.

While AI has certainly become a top opportunity for today’s cybersecurity teams, it has also introduced considerable cyberthreats as well.

“It’s not so much that AI is actually finding new things to exploit, but rather that it can automate a lot of the activities that normally would be performed by human attackers,” explained Brian Martin, Integrity360’s director of product management.

“So therefore, they can find exposures a lot faster, they can adapt more quickly to blockers that they find, and then they can execute more and more stages of the attack autonomously and at scale.”

Chris Hosking, AI and cloud security evangelist at SentinelOne, said AI has impacted cybersecurity by “empowering the threat landscape”.

“It’s made [threat actors] faster, it’s given them more sophistication than they’ve had before and it’s also lowered the barrier to entry,” he said.

However, he emphasised that AI also provides considerable opportunities for cyber defence teams. “We can have a phenomenal edge if we move to things like agentic auto triage, auto investigation. But we’re really sort of only dipping our toes right now into what AI can do for us, but a lot of opportunity ahead.”

Martin agreed, stating that cybersecurity teams need to “fight fire with fire” by utilising AI technology.

“We need to be able to move away from some of the manual and sort of fragmented visibility that we’ve had in order to be able to respond to that increasing scale and rapidity of attack.”

With the scale and complexity of cybersecurity and cyberthreats greater than it’s ever been, plenty in attendance at the conference had advice for companies that might be wondering how to adapt.

Niall Errity, director of professional services at Vectra, said that companies need to “understand their own gaps in their own network”.

“I think a lot of organisations tend to be very one or two tool-focused,” he said. “They think, ‘oh, I have an EDR [endpoint detection and response] installed on my endpoints and I’m perfectly fine now, I don’t need to worry about anything else beyond that’.

“Unless they’re doing the proper analysis in their own environments, doing proper testing to really make sure they’re resilient, they won’t really know their own gaps. So my recommendation would be to constantly look at what’s happening in the news, what’s happening with organisations. Take those learnings and test your own environments to make sure that you have those gaps closed.”

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