After feed-sharing bouncer, private players in for more bodyline bowling

After being forced to share feed of important sporting events with public broadcaster Prasar Bharati, private players may be in for some more trouble as the government plans to make them spell out terms of conditions for feed sharing two months prior to an event.

According to official sources, the government is looking to stipulate that the public broadcaster be informed of the terms and conditions two months prior to the start of a series (like cricket) or other important sporting event that needs to be shared with Doordarshan. This was being done to give elbow room to Prasar Bharati to negotiate deals with private players over the terms and conditions regarding sharing and marketing of an event, sources said.

The new mandate is likely to come in the form of rules attached to the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Act passed earlier this year. The move is expected to put further pressure on the rights holders, feel analysts.

When contacted, Prasar Bharati officials chose not to comment. A senior official with a leading private broadcaster said on condition of anonymity that a it might sometimes be ?practically impossible? to provide these details two months in advance as telecast rights may not be finalised so soon. ?Sometimes, the rights to a particular series/event is not even awarded two months in advance while sometimes the schedule is not there. So how can we provide these details to them?? the official said.

Most terms and conditions relate to marketing of the series and who actually hopes to sell the series at a higher rate. The revenue share is already fixed at 75:25, the majority in favour of the rights holder.

The government had come out with an Act earlier this year to force private broadcasters share live telecast of sporting events of national importance with Doordarshan after many of them refused to share rights saying it would make their business unviable as they spent crores on it. The issue of sharing rights had snowballed into a major controversy with broadcasters like Nimbus (holding the lucrative rights to BCCI?s domestic series) asking for a cut in actual payouts to the cricket board in view of telecast sharing.

The board had, in fact, finally relented to the demands and agreed to cut down on the payout by Nimbus after working out the quantum of the expected loss to the private broadcaster due to feed sharing.