On top of feed chain, DD holds all aces

The Information & Broadcasting Ministry’s Sports Broadcasting Bill has started taking a toll, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jun 1, 2007, 21:18:28 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Information & Broadcasting Ministry’s Sports Broadcasting Bill, which makes it mandatory for the right-holders to share their live cricket feed with Doordarshan (DD), has started taking a toll.

On Wednesday, Zee walked out of a contract with the BCCI on the telecast of matches played on offshore non-Test venues and Nimbus refused to telecast the Afro-Asia Cup, which starts in Bangalore on June 5.

Clearly, the implications of the new law are starting to be felt — this might spell the beginning of the end of huge price tags for the rights of matches in the subcontinent.

Broadcasters like ESPN-Star (ESS) have supported the sharing of feed, provided DD encrypts its signal for terrestrial viewing; other sports broadcasters, though, have reservations over the 75:25 (tilted in their favour) of the revenue sharing mechanism with DD.

All broadcasters have opposed the sharing of the feed on DD’s DTH service.

“Giving DD 25 per cent of the revenue for just carrying the signal is not fair,” a spokesman for a broadcaster said.

It was precisely on this issue that Nimbus had moved the Delhi High Court against DD during the West Indies and Sri Lanka series just before the World Cup.

The issue of encryption of signal by DD is hanging in the balance, even though the technical committee constituted by the government had said that encryption was possible.

The committee submitted its report to the government in mid April — suggesting eight different technologies — but the ministry is yet to make a final decision.

“We are working on financial and technological implications of encrypting the signal for DD,” a senior ministry official told HT. Incidentally, the ministry had rejected the BCCI’s offer to pay for the encryption.

If DD does encrypt the signal, its viewers would get a clean signal from the broadcaster — then DD stands to make money by filling in the advertisements.

The encryption, though, won’t happen in a hurry — according to I&B Ministry officials, it would still take several months because equipment must be bought for 1,400 terrestrial transmitters of DD to cover entire country.

chetan@hindustantimes.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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