MILLIONS of cricket fans in India must be excited by the compromise brokered by the Delhi High Court allowing Doordarshan (DD) to telecast with a seven-minute delay the remaining ODI matches between India and West Indies and the first one between India and Sri Lanka.
But they certainly do not know whether they will be able to watch the last three one-dayers of the Sri Lanka series. The matter is scheduled to be heard again in the court to resolve the deadlock between Nimbus and DD on February 8.
This was not the first time that a private broadcaster and DD have temporarily resolved the issue of sharing the live feed in the courts.
In the last few days, there has been a lot of dust raised over the sharing of the live cricket feed between Nimbus and DD. There were tons of words written in the media about the deliberate reluctance of the DD and Nimbus to resolve the deadlock before the India-West Indies series began.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) must remember it is making money through guaranteed viewership and it will be a crime to deprive the millions of rural audience who cannot afford to get cable connections in their homes. Are they not Indians and enjoy the right of a live coverage? Being the supreme cricketing body the BCCI has the moral responsibility to find a way to resolve the deadlock between the right-holders and DD for good, considering its chief Sharad Pawar is an important and powerful personality in the UPA government at the Centre.
At the heart of the dispute is not the public interest which the central government claims, but it is all about making huge money through ads. Nimbus has paid a hefty $612 million for the rights till 2011, but DD believes in bullying Nimbus to share its cleanfeed without even spending a single pie for bagging the rights.
Nimbus is right to lay the condition that DD to encrypt its live feed to ensure that it isn’t freely available for redistribution and DD’s argument that encryption is beyond its technical expertise just cannot be digested. It is obliged to get its act together as soon as possible.
One of the solutions to end the problem is to align the interests of both the right-holders and Prasar Bharati. This can be done by DD telecasting the same feed by Neo Sports, without changing a single advertisement. Once Neo Sports and advertisers know in advance that their feed would be carried by DD, and reach DTH homes as well, Neo Sports would be able to fix advertising rates that take into account the combined reach of the public broadcaster and the private channel.
DD would be entitled to a share of the additional advertising revenue as legitimate carriage fees, after all, without their network carrying the telecast signal, the ads’ reach would be severely limited, and the ad rates proportionately lower. This sharing formula can be determined by mutual agreement, the broadcast regulator or the courts.
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