SOME interesting discussion this week out of two BCCI comments, the first being Lalit Modi’s wish to block internet and news channel piracy of cricket content, the second being the comment from Sachin Tendulkar on giving free tickets for Test matches to children.
I see both as being related, and a welcome sign of those involved in Indian cricket to protect both the sport and the commercial value of the sport.
Sachin’s point was spot on. A Test match is nothing without context and atmosphere. The Ashes Tests make the point well, the full crowds add to the history and rivalry. The sport needs children to enjoy and appreciate Test cricket. In the days of empty seats at Indian Test grounds and relatively full coffers at the BCCI, the timing of Sachin’s comment is ideal.
The IPL’s success in year 1 owed much to full crowds marking the startling division between the IPL and the non international cricket that had happened previously in the country.
The crowds owed much to the relentless feed of news stories on the IPL that had filled the previous months. I’m still a little uncomfortable with the auction process, but there’s no doubt that it helped grab public attention, and each franchise’s local promotion helped develop the momentum. Just because cricket is king in India, it can’t ignore its audience.
The IPL’s grasp on the news channels is an interesting symbol of the strange double edged sword that news channels present to sports events.
All sports are happy of the coverage that the Indian news channels provide in advance of a sports event. I’m off to a press conference on Monday in Delhi for the Compaq Cup in Sri Lanka. The success of the activity will no doubt be largely measured by the attention paid by the news channels.
Yet when it comes to actually covering the event, there’s no doubt in my mind that Indian news channels overstep the line in terms of their use of footage from the sports channels.
I have no issue with the concept that news channels have the right to use 30 seconds of action to show the story of the day as part of a news bulletin.
Where I think the news channels go too far is after a sports channel has paid a multi million dollar rights fee and hundreds of thousands of dollars of production costs to cover an event, then a news channel takes those pictures and creates sponsored content based on multiple clips and replays of that footage – all taken off air for no payment, and sold in competition to the original sports broadcaster.
The use of the archive material after the day of the game further abuses the principle of news access, and often breaches the copyright under which the sports broadcaster signed the original agreement. (We sign the rights for a specific term, and cannot use the footage after that term. A news broadcast in India re-uses the footage for ever despite the lack of any written agreement)
There has to be a fairer balance between sports and news channels, based on an agreed code of access, which explicitly prevents the news channel cutting live to an event and restricts archive use in particular.
One of Lalit’s points is that the activities of the news broadcasters need to be monitored and checked. The way we want to see our sport has changed, and if sports channels (and indeed sports federations) are to protect their position, then control on the bite size pieces of information that suit news channels, broadband and mobile becomes increasingly important.
Already the widespread piracy of live cricket on broadband has destroyed the pay per view American business that seemed set to be the new growth market for cricket. As broadband develops, the same business challenge will arrive in the UK, the Middle East and eventually India itself. That’s why it’s such good news that Lalit is setting his mind to the challenge, just as Sachin is addressing the long term problem of a youth audience at Test cricket.
