BCCI has opened the e-auctions for the broadcasting rights of India’s domestic and international home matches. A round of frenetic bidding from Star India and SPN, owned by Sony Corp, is expected as both of them are the media giants in the Indian market and they will try to put their everything in grabbing those rights.

However, Star and Sony both have written to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) expressing their displeasure for the BCCI demand, which states that the board is asking the media rights winner to pay the same amount for matches involving two visiting teams as well in case of international series like a World T20 or 50-over World Cup.

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Star in its letter, as quoted in CricketNext, has written: “The average viewership on Indian matches is significantly higher than on non-India matches (as surveyed during the Asia Cup in 2016). Even an India match with a non-Test playing nation generates more viewership than two major Test nations playing each other. The bidder is expected to attribute the same per match value to any such match, without any realistic possibility of recovering such value. Paying same per match value for India matches and non-India matches is not commercially viable. We request the BCCI and CoA to reconsider their position.”

On the other hand, Sony expressed similar amount of concern in their letter, as per the reports of CricketNext, they have written: “These last minute changes on the bid documentation and the online bid is making it difficult for us to prepare for the bid on 3rd April. As you know, there are a lot of calculations and modeling that goes into a bid preparation and these last-minute changes create so much uncertainty. One issue that is particularly of concern is regarding tri-series in India organized by the BCCI. The clarification says all matches will be valued the same. This means an India-Afghanistan-Bangladesh or an India-Bangladesh-Zimbabwe will be valued equally with an India-Australia-South Africa. This quite frankly is illogical. Advertisers and even the viewing public do not value these matches equally and for the BCCI to consider all of them as having the same value does injustice to bidders. We would earnest request BCCI to reconsider.”

Also read: Members have no clue on CoA’s e-auction decision

Star India paid a hefty amount of $757.6 million for the broadcasting rights for the matches from July 2012 to March 2018. SPN lost out to them for the Indian Premier League, after broadcasting India’s biggest money spinner from 2008 till 2017. While SPN lost out in the bid to get the media rights of the IPL, they won the license to broadcast Australian and English cricket in the subcontinent, taking their tally to seven Test-playing nations.

Talking about the same, the president of SPN’s Sports and Distribution Business, Rajesh Kaul said, “The whole idea was to strengthen our overall leadership position. ECB was a very important and integral part of the strategy. While Australian cricket happens during the winter here, cricket in England is during the summer. There is a very encouraging trend of other sports also getting traction in this part of the world, but cricket is still the largest. And to have that dominant leadership position in cricket was very, very critical for us.”