Review rights fees, cry broadcasters; No way: BCCI
MUMBAI/NEWDELHI: With the e-auction of the high-in-demand Board of Control for Cricket in India rights just days away, two broadcasting majors – STAR and Sony – have raised objection regarding the rights fees for non-india matches.
STAR and Sony have written to BCCI saying they are not keen to pay the same per-match fee for a tie featuring India and one that pits two non-india sides.
A highly-placed Board official supervising the high-profile e-auction said due diligence has been followed and no objection from any broadcaster will be admitted at this advanced stage.
“Paying an identical permatch value for India as well as non-india matches is commercially unviable for a broadcaster and it is next to impossible to create a viable business proposition under such circumstances,” STAR said in a letter addressed to BCCI CEO Rahul Johri on Thursday.
To substantiate their point, STAR provided viewership numbers from the 2016 Asia Cup which shows that average viewership for an India match even with a non-test playing team like UAE garners more than double the viewership of a match between Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
Declining to be part of a mock e-auction that BCCI had planned for Friday and Saturday, Sony’s email to BCCI had a similar tone.
Sony, which lost out to STAR in the IPL bidding war last September, said: “One issue that is particularly of concern is regarding tri-series in India organised by the BCCI. The clarification says all matches will be valued the same. This means an IndiaAfghanistan-bangladesh or an India-bangladesh-zimbabwe will be valued equally with an India-australia-south Africa.
“This quite frankly is illogical. Advertisers and even the viewing public do not value these matches equally and for the BCCI to consider all of them as having the same value does injustice to bidders. We would earnestly request BCCI to reconsider,” said the Sony letter.
The Board official said the current e-auction is “as per the 2009 tender process.” There never was any dual rights fees for matches, he added. The BCCI will sell various rights for the next five-year (2018-2023) cycle. These include the lucrative global broadcast and digital rights. STAR held BCCI rights from 2012-2018.
When they outbid Multi Screen Media (Sony) in April, 2012 STAR, then wholly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, paid BCCI a whopping ~3851 crore(approximately $750 million) for approximately 96 international matches on Indian soil. Sony’s bid was valued at ~3,700 crore.
At that rate, STAR paid approximately ~40 crore for every international, substantially more than the ~32.5 crore per match Nimbus paid. The partnership between BCCI and Nimbus had an acrimonious ending that finally went to court.
The Board official said STAR and Sony letters were “perhaps aimed to scuttle” the e-auction process. At least two BCCI officebearers in ad hoc roles are not on the same page with the Committee of Administrators and the CEO. The Future Tours Programme of the International Cricket Council has been approved till 2023 and every member nation has “full visibility” of what matches have been scheduled, said the official.
“And in that FTP there are no tri-nation series scheduled in India. So, where is the issue?” asked the official. He added that unlike the last cycle where the BCCI had signed an MOU with Pakistan to play multiple bilateral series on a home-and-away basis, there is no such confusion now.
The e-auction will be held on April 3.