Cricket has in the past managed to get megabucks for any channel. However, DD has been losing money, or so it has been claimed in the media, on its sports telecasts when airtime was being marketed by Siddharth Ray's Stracon. It's not known whether DD made any money on the controversial telecast of the World Cup Cricket, which was marketed by Harish Thawani's Nimbus.

With its poor track record, will DD be able to give a guarantee that it will not mess up again? It has a whole five years to spoil the broth. At a cost of Rs 45 crore a year, DD will have to make at least Rs 70-80 crore in ad revenues per annum to break even, after considering production and telecast expenses.

ESPN-STAR Sports could makemoney from cricket because it was also collecting subscription revenues from cable operators. Will DD also take a similar route and make DD Sports a pay service? Does it have the distribution infrastructure to deal with the huge swathe of the cable trade all over the country and hand them decoders and collect subscription revenues? Or will it simply levy a tax on cable operators for STAR Sports?

These are questions which are begging for answers apart from the issue of the quality of production, which can be sorted out if it chooses to sign on either TWI or WorldTel or any other sports production company. We will have to watch whether DD will once again shoot itself in the foot and bleed. Or whether it will hit the target for once.

Saldanha goes to school

It looks as if only the entrepreneurial and media-shy advertising agency owners are willing to give back to advertising what it has given them over the years. Joining the ranks of AG Krishnamurthy, who set up India's first focused advertisinginstitute, is the former Chaitra Leo Burnett promoter and chairman Walter Saldanha.

Saldanha's initiative to set up a school for communications close to Neral in Matheran needs to be lauded. Reason: He is doing it of his own volition. Saldanha says he is going to spare no pains and money to see that the institute gets the best faculty, both international and local.

All one can say is that the advertising industry needs many more Saldanhas and Krishnamurthys. Hats off to them both.

Cracking a cable TV issue

This is an issue that the government will have to face up to sometime or the other. Some cable operators have been refusing television channels carriage on their networks, demanding either carriage fees or freebies.

With the glut of channels and limited reception capacity of Indian television sets, some cable operators have been getting by by armtwisting programmers.

Former I&B secretary Bhaskar Ghose had three years ago warned MSOs that if they tried to bully channels into paying up,government would punish them. Recently, Prasar Bharati chief RR Shah has also been insisting that cable TV operators carry two DD channels on their networks on the prime band as the Cable TV Act of 1995 makes it mandatory. Both digital and analog satellite and analog terrestrial signals are theirs for the picking. However, not all cable ops have been complying.

The situation is worse with private television channels who have no must-carry clauses in their favour like DD does. Cable operators constantly arm twist them for free receivers, dishes, or sometimes even money. The situation is likely to become worse when cable TV networks start producing more and more of their own programming.

Cable operators themselves blocking four to six channels for their own programming. Which seems patently unfair.

Dutch authorities were faced with a similar situation recently. The monopoly authority called the Nma and telecoms authority OPTA to force cable ops to give all television and radio channels equal access totheir networks. The two organisations said that cable companies had no business giving their own channels any advantageous position on their systems. Which channel gets carried where should be based on economics and not on mere corporate relationships.

The judgment has some relevance in India. And the authorities should look at passing a similar order which would result in an even playing field for all.

(The writer is the editor of The Indian Cab&Sat Reporter. Feel free to email with your comments to television@vsnl.com or television@hotmail.com)