COLOMBO: After a protracted process, Sri Lanka Cricket has “got real” and eventually struck a deal with Sony Pictures Network India wherein SPN will retain the broadcasting and digital rights (originally held by Ten Sports) for all home international cricket matches played in Sri Lanka for the next three years from 2020.
“We are quite pleased with what we have received. We have also received the Sports Ministry approval to go ahead,” Sri Lanka Cricket secretary Mohan de Silva told local newspaper FT Daily at the successful conclusion of the contract.
“After negotiating, they have enhanced the figures and we are quite happy considering the times and the situation in world cricket and market conditions (emphasis ours),” De Silva told the daily.
Interestingly, as per information made available to SportzPower, the “enhanced figure” De Silva is referring to is all of $400 making the bid that Sony made $22 million + $400.
Is the figure a good deal for Sony? By SportzPower’s reckoning $16 million to $17.5 million would / should be the negotiating range in a post COVID world.
So why would Sony have basically matched the Lex + FanCode bid figure. We are speculating here, but have to assume that $22 million was the base price from which negotiations were conducted once the bid was cancelled.
What is worth mentioning here is that $22 million was the combined bids for television, radio and digital rights that Lex Sportel Vision Ltd (which runs pay TV channel 1Sport in India and DSport in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Maldives) and multi-sport digital streaming platform FanCode had made when SLC had first issued its invitation to tender (ITT) in February.
Lex’s bid for TV and radio broadcasting rights was $16 million for the three-year cycle while FanCode had bid $6 million for the digital rights.
SLC had scrapped the tender process at the time as it was unhappy with the bids received.
“We were not happy with the offers we got,” a senior SLC official had told the local Sunday Times at the time. “Therefore, we decided to re-tender broadcasting rights but not production rights.” The best offer for production rights was $4.1 million which the tender evaluation committee (TEC) was “satisfied” with.
Sunday Times had further reported then that the two bidders had wanted the board to negotiate their terms with them rather than re-floating the tender. But the SLC stood firm in order to keep the process as “transparent” as possible.
Unlike in previous years, SLC had floated three separate tenders for TV and radio broadcast rights, TV production rights and digital broadcast rights spanning the next three years in view of its partnership with Sony (formerly Ten Sports) ending on March 31. This was the first time SLC floated digital rights separately.
This decision to separate digital rights from TV/Radio broadcasting rights, apart from the lack of transparency, was what made SPN stay away from the tender process in the first round.
In the second round both Lex and FanCode stayed away in protest over the cancellation of the first round so SPN was in effect the sole bidder.
SportzPower has been told that what worked in SPN’s favour at the negotiating table was also the fact that as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic having laid waste to the sporting landscape, the cards were pretty much stacked in the Sony network’s favour.
And as Daily FT noted, SLC in that sense have been lucky somewhat to retain SPN for their broadcasting and digital rights. That partnership comes from the good rapport both SLC and Sony TV has built over the years, which dates back to 2002 with Ten Sports. “They have been good paymasters and they’ve never defaulted. The credibility of the company itself they are about the best there is no doubt,” said De Silva.
Ten Sports had clinched the rights in 2013 for seven years for $34.873 million. This was without the rights for the India tour of Sri Lanka in 2017, which the board had earlier sold to the same company for $25.5 million. Therefore, SLC’s total TV rights deal with Ten Sports (and subsequently SPN) was worth $60.373 million. The production rights costs were around $14-15 million, also held by Ten Sports.
For the record, the ground rights for the next three years has been secured by Delhi-based ITW Consulting Ltd., which came in for the Nidahas trophy hosted by Sri Lanka in 2018.
SLC’s international media rights have historically been acquired by Indian broadcasters, with Team India tours accounting for most of their value.
POSTSCRIPT: With Mahinda Rajapaksa, South Asia’s longest serving ruler, returning to power after five Years out of office, expect the heat to be truly on for the present lot of administrators running SLC.
The 74-year-old leader is back at the top in Sri Lankan politics along with his three siblings, winning the general elections held on Wednesday with a landslide victory.
With the results out, former Sri Lanka captain Arjuna Ranatunga. who heads the opposing camp in the SLC, will be “waiting with sharpened knives”. And the “paltry” $400 extra that the Sri Lankan board’s mandarins managed to extract out of Sony would likely form a key part of the ammunition Ranatunga is gathering towards that end.
