MUMBAI: It’s a week of hectic activity ahead for sports broadcasters, with the deadlines for submission of tenders for a number of big and not so big properties coming up over the next few days.
The big daddy of them all of course is the ICC’s cricket rights, for which the present deadline for bids submission is 10 November.
Also up for bidding are the tenders for English Premiere League football (7 November deadline) and the rights to Bangladesh cricket (8 November).
As far as the Big One is concerned, up for grabs are the audio-visual rights for 18 ICC tournaments starting from the second half of 2007 till the World Cup in 2015.
The current agreement with Global Cricket Corporation (a News Corp subsidiary), which began in 2000, ends in March/April 2007 with the World Cup in the West Indies. GCC, which won the global rights with a $ 550 million bid, had sold the satellite rights for the Indian subcontinent territory to Sony Entertainment Television India for $ 208 million.
Market speculation on how high the bidding will go this time round range from at least a billion dollars to even as high as $ 2 billion.
While Sony is the “incumbent broadcaster” for ICC cricket, it is ESPN Star Sports which currently holds the rights to both Bangladesh cricket as well as EPL.
