Southern flavour on sports watch

It’s the best of both worlds in sport, especially south. Sony Pictures Sports Network has launched an exclusive channel in Telugu and Tamil, Ten 4, on Tuesday. It began with quite a boom, as regional commentary accompanied the WWE wrestling live action.

The big feast would be 10 days later though, when the biggest international football tournaments of the year, Euro and Copa America, kick off. Euro will be telecast in six languages — English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam while Copa will drop Hindi from the list.

“During these difficult times, the festival of football is something to cheer about for the fans. We are very excited,” says Rajesh Kaul, Chief Revenue Officer, Distribution and Head — Sports Business, Sony Pictures Networks India.

“We have four months of top class sport lined up — Olympics, India’s cricket tours to Sri Lanka and England. We couldn’t have asked for more,” he adds.

“We are pioneers in trying out sports content in different languages... we have been doing this for all the marquee events. We will have commentary by different experts on the cricket series and other big competitions in local languages for sure. People are going to love it,” he says, adding “Apart from Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, we are trying to reach more languages across the country. We already have Bengali, Malayalam and Hindi feeds.”

Sony also announced their panelists for Euro that features footballers Bhaichung Bhutia, Sunil Chhetri, Louis Saha, Luis Garcia, Don Hutchison, David James, Terry Phelan, Mark Seagraves, Ashley Westwood, Jofre Mateu, Gurpreet Singh Sandhu, Sandesh Jhingan and Robin Singh.