ITV

Tag: DS Bhandari

  • After hearing Zee’s side, case adjourned to Monday

    After hearing Zee’s side, case adjourned to Monday

    MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court has adjourned hearing in the much-contested BCCI cricket telecast rights case to Monday after Zee Telefilms exhaustively put forward its argument.

    Arguing before a two-judge Bench of Chief Justice DS Bhandari and Justice DY Chandrachud, Zee’s counsel argued that ESPN has not produced a ‘clean signal’ of live cricket matches completely in-house. Neither the West Indies-India series nor the South Africa-India and England matches were exclusively produced by ESPN. It was only in the Asia Cup that the production was done in-house.

    Zee raised the point that ESPN had sidelined the consortium clause and was creating confusion over production facilities. The ‘hawk eye’ camera and other facilities belonged to proprietary companies and neither to ESPN or to Zee. ‘Today to produce the match for telecasting, cameras are planted. All of us rent out those facilities. It is only a question of how much each of us do,’ argued the Zee counsel.

    ESPN had been showing cricket in India so far. Zee has a presence in 88 countries and has been showing cricket when India plays overseas. “If BCCI is entertaining Zee today, the board obviously considers us eligible,” said the Zee counsel.

    Justice Chandrachud queried Zee counsel on whether the company had experience in TV production of cricket matches as Zee had mentioned ‘telecast but no production’ experience in its bid for the BCCI rights. Zee counsel admitted that Zee had never produced clean signals. “But neither ESPN nor Zee have produced clean signals for two years,” the counsel said.

    Zee pointed out that PriceWaterhouse Coopers was the global auditor of ESPN and had a conflict of interest. “PwC had not sent any reply to Zee on its inquiries. But ESPN had got a response from PwC in a letter on September 6,” the counsel said.

    India has emerged as the largest commercial market for cricket and accounts for 80 per cent of the worldwide revenue for the sport. BCCI has put up tenders and an Indian-owned company with a homegrown network with large production facilities has bid. “Let’s not miss the wood for the trees,” the Zee counsel said. “The public interest has suffered. ESPN has put no argument saying that it has been detrimental to public interest. They are only working for their interest and monopoly.”

    Earlier, ESPN counsel argued that the licence was under Zee TV, USA. Zee had never done any cricket production, he added.

  • After hearing Zee’s side, case adjourned to Monday

    After hearing Zee’s side, case adjourned to Monday

    MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court has adjourned hearing in the much-contested BCCI cricket telecast rights case to Monday after Zee Telefilms exhaustively put forward its argument.

    Arguing before a two-judge Bench of Chief Justice DS Bhandari and Justice DY Chandrachud, Zee’s counsel Harish Salve argued that ESPN has not produced a clean signal of live cricket matches completely in-house. Neither the West Indies-India series nor the South Africa-India and England matches were exclusively produced by ESPN. It was only in the Asia Cup that the production was done in-house.

    Zee raised the point that ESPN had sidelined the consortium clause and was creating confusion over production facilities. The hawk eye camera and other facilities belonged to proprietary companies and neither to ESPN or to Zee. Today to produce the match for telecasting, cameras are planted. All of us rent out those facilities. It is only a question of how much each of us do, Salve argued.

    ESPN had been showing cricket in India so far. Zee has a presence in 88 countries and has been showing cricket when India plays overseas. If BCCI is entertaining Zee today, the board obviously considers us eligible, said Salve.

    Justice Chandrachud then queried Salve on whether the company had experience in TV production of cricket matches as Zee had mentioned telecast but no production experience in its bid for the BCCI rights. Salve admitted that Zee had never produced clean signals. But neither ESPN nor Zee have produced clean signals for two years, the counsel said.

    The court then observed, “If we strictly stick to your line of argument then both the parties (Zee and ESS) would be ineligible.”

    Responding to the court’s observation, Salve, while agreeing with the point made by the bench, drew attention to the fact that none of the parties, and that includes Prasar Bharti, would “strictly speaking” be eligible to get the telecast rights as all were merely licensees and hire production units to telecast matches.

    Moving on to another issue, Salve pointed out that PriceWaterhouse Coopers, which had been assigned the task of vetting the bids, was the global auditor of ESPN and had a conflict of interest. PwC had not sent any reply to Zee on its inquiries. But ESPN had got a response from PwC in a letter on September 6, Salve said.

    India has emerged as the largest commercial market for cricket and accounts for 80 per cent of the worldwide revenue for the sport. BCCI has put up tenders and an Indian-owned company with a homegrown network with large production facilities has bid. Lets not miss the wood for the trees, he said. The public interest has suffered. ESPN has put no argument saying that it has been detrimental to public interest. They are only working for their interest and monopoly.

    Earlier, ESPN’s counsel Iqbal Chaggla, referring to SAB TV’s argument about ESS being a foreign entity in an intervention application filed yesterday, told the court that even Zee has its registered offices in countries like the USA and United Kingdom. Chaggla argued that company’s licence was under Zee TV, USA.

    BCCI TO HONOUR COURT DIKTAT

    The working committee of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, which held an emergency meeting in Kolkata yesterday, has decided to follow the court’s diktat that status quo be maintained on the issue of telecast rights.

    This rules out any further moves on the part of the BCCI to offer the piecemeal rights of the upcoming Australia series to national broadcaster Doordarshan.

    In its submission to the court today, the BCCI sought time for arguments and the court told it to put forward its submissions on Monday when its counsel, KK Venugopal, is expected to address the court.

    The court has still to look into the maintainability of the writ filed by ESS and the arguments will continue on Monday at 2:45 pm. The court has also allowed the intervention application filed by SAB TV.

    This of course raises the question of whether the court will be able to deliver its verdict on the matter by next week because time is running out for all the parties to the dispute.

  • Court adjourns sports rights case; Zee has till Tuesday to decide whether it will re-bid

    Court adjourns sports rights case; Zee has till Tuesday to decide whether it will re-bid

    MUMBAI: Give this round to ESPN-Star Sports. The Bombay High Court, which this morning proposed that the sports broadcaster and Zee Network submit fresh bids to the Registrar General of the High Court, has given Subhash Chandra’s network till Tuesday to decide whether it is agreeable to the court’s proposition.

    Zee’s board of directors is meeting on Monday to decide on what course of action to take. If Zee agrees to the proposal, it has to inform the court accordingly on Tuesday. Then both Zee and ESS will have to submit fresh bids on Wednesday, 15 September. If it does decide to put in a fresh bid, only ESS and Zee will be allowed to submit afresh. One rider the court has inserted here is that there will be no further avenue of appeal if this route is taken by the two claimants in the case.

    What is curious about the proposal put forth by the High Court however, is that whosever’s bid is higher, will get the rights. That means that the criteria of merit goes out of the window, which is the sole argument around which ESS moved the courts in the first place.

    Coming back to the choice before Zee, if it is not agreeable to a re-bid, the case will stand adjourned till Thursday (16 September), when the Bench of Chief Justice DS Bhandari and Justice DY Chandrachud will here arguments on whether Zee is eligible or not to telecast cricket matches.The bench apparently decided to take the re-bid route to try and avoid further waste of time on the issue. The BCCI counsel had expressed worry that if the issue continued rebounding back and forth, then when the Australian team comes down in October, a broadcaster might still not be finalised.

    The talk doing the rounds is that if Zee agrees to the re-bid, then the price for the India telecast rights could touch an astronomical and financially crippling $350 million. Either way the third party in the case, the BCCI benefits.

    However, addressing a media gathering after the hearing, ESS Asia MD Rik Dovey maintained that India cricket was not a survival issue for the broadcaster.

    “We are looking to grow our business. We have a strong connection with Indian cricket through our brand ambassador Sachin Tendulkar. We also have Saurav Ganguly. We also have cricket from England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Bangladesh. We would like to add India to our kitty.”

    Earlier in the day, ESS’ counsel had argued that Zee had not produced a single day of cricket thus far. “They buy the rights to cricket for their international territories. This includes animation graphics and replays. The only thing that is from Zee are the ads.

    What we are disappointed at is the fact that the BCCI deviated from its norms. The bids were supposed to be placed before Price waterhouse Coopers for evaluation. This never happened. PWC only tabulated the bids. In fact, responding to a letter from us, they said that they had told the BCCI to inform all the bidders of their limited role. The BCCI did not do so.”

    The counsel added that BCCI president Jagmohan Dalimya had had a private phone conversation with Subhash Chandra where the Zee Group CMD was informed that his network was eligible. “How can Dalmiya do this? The bid stipulation is clearly aimed at excluding those parties who do not have their own production unit.

    “We gave details of our production unit in our bid document. Even for England tours which are produced by Sky, we take our own production team along with cameras. That is because Indian viewers want to view the action from the perspective of Saurav Ganguly and the team. We also have our own commentary team.”

    The counsel maintained that Zee on the other hand would either hire a production unit or license the rights to a third party. “If you do that then you cannot claim to be possessing production expertise.” Dovey added that a sports broadcaster would produce cricket in a far better manner than a non sports broadcaster. “There are a host of specials that we create around our presentation. The Asia Cup is an example of that.”

    Meanwhile, the tremors of today’s developments were felt on the bourses with the Zee scrip getting quite a hammering. Zee’s share price, which opened the day at Rs 161.50, plummeted to a low of Rs 149.40 before recovering slightly to close at Rs 151.15, down 6.4 per cent.

    As had been earlier reported by Indiantelevision.com Zee Telefilms has already made the initial payment of $20 million to BCCI for telecast rights of the India cricket matches.