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Indian Premier League (IPL) chairman Lalit Modi has revealed that he wants the IPL to become the “dominant sporting league in the world”.

The third edition of the tournament starts on March 12 and Modi believes the groundbreaking deal it signed with YouTube to stream coverage live over the internet is a major step to helping him achieve his goal.

“We are only a two-year-old league but we had close to 3.8 billion eyeballs last year,” he told The Guardian newspaper. “I use that phrase every time a person sits down and watches an IPL game live or on TV – that's an 'eyeball'. Every game last year we had 100 million eyeballs. But because our objective is to become the most watched sporting event in the world, we are now targeting 150 million every day.

"This new deal with Google and YouTube will take us to a new level. I strongly believe my job as an administrator is to make sure our product is available to the widest possible audience in the world. Until now, if you're sitting in America or Finland and you want to watch cricket, you have a problem. Because cricket is not a major sport in these countries it will not be broadcast. But the IPL will now be live on YouTube. If someone watches the IPL we can monitor it and the numbers will mean advertisers and subscribers are going to follow.

"Of course we want it to be traditionally broadcast as well. The IPL has sold broadcasting rights for $2.4bn [£1.6bn]. Our Champions League, for clubs, will receive a billion dollars for 10 years of broadcasting rights. But there are so many devices now you can just connect your broadband to the TV and watch that way. Or you can watch it on your mobile. The consumer can decide. He can communicate with his friends on a social network site at the same time as he watches the IPL."

Modi is adamant that Twenty20 cricket will eventually surpass the Test game.

"Twenty20 will become the dominant format – without doubt,” he said. “It lasts only three hours and people don't have time any more to sit all day watching cricket. We're competing with football and other sports and I think three hours is a good time limit to help us expand the market. We are definitely bringing new consumers to cricket.

"I am a great supporter of Test cricket. People say I'm not but I also run the marketing department of the BCCI [Board of Control for Cricket in India] and Test cricket is extremely important to us. All I am trying to do is remind people that we live in a modern age and Test cricket has a big problem: it is played in the daytime when most people are working.

"We should be embracing every opportunity for getting viewers into watching Tests and the most effective way is making it a day-night game. If you take it to day-night, then people can watch it on TV when they get home from work – or they can go to the stadium. There has been a big drop in Test cricket viewing [outside England and the Ashes] and it's because people don't have the leisure time in the day to watch it."

Modi even predicts that Test cricket could disappear altogether if it does not move with the times, because he thinks broadcasters will lose interest.

“Whether we like it or not, broadcasting determines whether a game survives,” he added. “Without broadcasters you don't have money to pay players or keep the sport alive."