Watch India matches without ads on DD
All India matches plus semi-finals and finals of the Champions Trophy would be shown live and without advertisement on the national broadcaster Doordarshan. Chetan Chauhan reports.
All India matches plus semi-finals and finals of the Champions Trophy would be shown live and without advertisement on the national broadcaster Doordarshan.
This came after the Delhi High Court on Thursday asked the official broadcaster of the International Cricket Council (ICC) Champions Trophy, ESPN, to provide ‘clean feed’ of matches to Doordarshan as per the provisions of the Sports Broadcasting Act.
A bench of the Justice Manmohan Singh and R V Easwar directed ESPN to provide ‘clean feed" to Doordarshan as per commitment and objectives of the law.
This was after ESPN had expressed inability to provide ‘clean feed’ saying ICC has come up with a new system of embedding the feed with advertisements over which it had no control. The broadcaster also said in the past DD had accepted the feed with advertisements and its insistence for clean feed this time was "unreasonable" and "arbitrary".
DD, on its part, insisted that not providing a ‘clean feed" was in violation of the sports law. In fact, DD has now gone a step ahead and decided not to insert its own advertisements in the clean feed.
"As a public service broadcaster we will not insert any advertisement and the clean feed with commentary will be shown on all DD platforms (terrestrial and satellite)," Prasar Bharati Chief Executive Officer Jawhar Sircar told HT.
As per the law, DD can insert its own commercials in the live feed and has to share 75% of the revenue with the official broadcaster, in this case ESPN. But, DD went against generating revenue from the tournament to enhance its viewership. "For the first time cricket lovers in India will be able to watch the matches without any advertisements," Sircar said.
