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.

Updated on: Jun 7, 2013, 24:44:24 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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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.

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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