THIS is the period of the year when Dubai feels busy and the centre of the sporting world. This weekend we not only hosted the Pakistan-England cricket, but the V8 cars at Yas Marina and the WTA event in Dubai (with the ATP this week, albeit without a sick Federer).
It also saw the ICC annual sponsor forum when the great and good from the ICC meet with their sponsors in an annual talking shop. For some reason, I seem to be a regular part of this despite being neither the ICC’s broadcaster or dealing on a regular basis with any of their sponsors. Perhaps because of that distance, it normally ends up being an interesting day.
One of the discussions was on the changing role of new media. Prem Bhatia spoke with great enthusiasm on the potential for live streaming cricket pictures on mobile phones in India. The statistics are difficult to argue with, and the reality that we live with in the Middle East is that a rapidly increasing number of subscribers are signing up for live TV channels on their phones.
What is clear is that for the traditional backers of cricket (TV and sponsors), the world is changing. If increasing numbers of people continue to experience cricket via a different medium, then this effects the way that sponsorships work and that broadcast values are calculated.
I tried to make the point that over the last few years in many markets, the trend was to see less and less people experiencing an event live, but that those people were paying more for that event. This is the basic economics underpinning the principle of pay television as an industry, as viewers are driven towards a pay per view experience by necessity (if you’re watching the cricket World Cup in North America or South East Asia, effectively this is what you need to do).
However, the developments with Google / You Tube and the IPL sets that motion in reverse. It’s back to advertiser funded content rather than a pay model.
Whether advertiser funded or subscriber funded, the cricket that works is the content that is worth caring about. This current India v South Africa series clearly passes that test – a great contest that’s proving to be spectacular television. One of the discussions at the ICC forum was whether more needs to be done in India to stress the primacy of country vs country as opposed to franchise v franchise.
At it’s best there’s no holding country v country, when it delivers quality cricket that people care about. India v South Africa stands a worthy contrast to the current Australia v West Indies series or the two T20 Pakistan v England matches on my doorstep in Dubai. As for the New Zealand v Bangladesh series, I’d be happy to criticise it, but it doesn’t appear to be on TV anywhere outside New Zealand, a true sign of the lack of value for some international cricket.
Away from the cricket, the 2nd leg of the knock out stage of the Uefa champions league football is well set up for another remarkable couple of nights. One of the little known facts on the Champions League is that we have an obligation to provide all the Champions League games live on broadband in India. There is only an audience of hundreds for this pay service, but it’s an interesting example of a federation insisting that their content is made available on the web regardless of the current size of that audience.
The most watched TV event of the week was the Tiger Woods apology, but I wonder how many people saw the technical mess up. For the last five minutes of the choreographed show, the front on camera failed. It left Tiger not looking straight at a camera as he reached his emotional crescendo – the organisers tripped up by the simplest of mistakes in an attempted victory for public relations over news.
The author is COO, Taj Television Ltd.
