An unsporting proposal

Amending the sports broadcasting law will be unfair

The government’s recent proposal to amend The Sports Broadcasting Signals Act, 2007, to allow state-run Prasar Bharati to broadcast sporting fixtures deemed to be of national significance on private cable and direct-to-home (DTH) platforms betrays a lack of understanding of the underlying business model. The 2007 legislation, which replaced an Ordinance, made it mandatory for private TV and radio broadcasters to share with the public broadcaster live feeds of sports events deemed “sporting events of national importance”. Private broadcasters, principally in television where the money is to be made, argued against this as they pay billions of rupees to bid for the rights to broadcast these events. The grounds for grumbling were reduced partially because the Act allowed the private broadcaster to split the advertisement revenue earned from transmitting on Doordarshan and All India Radio in the 75:25 and 50:50 ratios, respectively. National cricket matches, the semi-finals and finals of the football World Cup, certain Grand Slam tennis matches and hockey fixtures, the Asian Games, Commonwealth Games and the Summer Olympics are among the events that come under the national importance rubric.

Till last year, private broadcasters faced another conundrum: Under Section 8 of the Cable Television Networks Act, all cable operators must carry two Doordarshan channels. This meant that cable companies gained access to key sporting events both through the private broadcasting channels, for which viewers have to pay, and also via Doordarshan channels, which are free. This created an asymmetrical playing field since subscribers were unlikely to pay for events they can view gratis. Pay TV operators also misused the provision by giving FTA (free-to-air) channels to paying subscribers, charging money from them and not sharing it with the broadcasting rights holder. Last year, Star India and ESPN won a reprieve for private broadcasters when the Supreme Court upheld a 2015 Delhi court ruling that Doordarshan could air those feeds only on its terrestrial network and its own direct-to-home (DTH) platform, Free Dish.

Now, the information and broadcasting ministry plans to amend the Act to allow games of national importance being aired on private cable and DTH platforms as well. The reasoning for this is hard to fathom. Doordarshan covers every TV home in the country, so those who cannot afford to pay admittedly expensive subscription fees for sports get a good opportunity to view them. Allowing other private platforms to access these feeds encourages them to revert to the earlier misuse, besides severely restricting the rights holders’ ability to recoup investments. For instance, in 2012, Star paid ~38.5 billion for the rights to all matches organised by the country’s cricket board between 2012 and 2018. The additional risk embedded in this proposal is its arbitrary nature. The Act allows the government to notify a sporting event as being of “national importance”. There is nothing to stop it from attaching this label to, say, the Indian Premier League, the cricket board’s cash cow, for which Star India paid ~163.5 billion for the broadcasting rights over 2018-22. The iniquity of this is clear. But as India’s legislators have repeatedly demonstrated, their welfare instincts are never stronger when it involves other people’s money.