These two rights packages were not exploited in the 2011/11 season but Perform holds them for the 2011/12 season. It is sub-licensing the mobile clips exclusively and the internet package non-exclusively to Times Of India.

• The internet highlights will go out on Indiatimes.com but Perform will also exploit them through its own ePlayer VOD product, which can be embedded on websites. Both Perform and Times Of India will sell ad inventory.
• The mobile highlights will go out through Indiatimes.com’s 58888 mobile service and through Times-branded sections of Indian telcos’ mobile portals.

Perform also holds similar rights packages in Spain and facilitates online broadcast for international rightsholders including Fox (NSDQ: NWS) Sports (Australia), Fox Soccer Channel (U.S.), abu Dhabi Media Company and Rogers (Canada).

Times Internet Limited’s Rishi Khiani (via release): “Given the growing popularity of football, especially England’s Barclays Premier League, in India, this is a strategic content partnership for us.

“Couple this with the growth of fans accessing sport via connected devices and our reach in the Indian market, we are poised to capitalize on these trends whilst simultaneously providing our readers and advertising partners with exciting new sport content.”

ESPN (NYSE: DIS) says the mobile version of its ESPNcricinfo site accounted for 45 percent (45 million) of all the brand’s page views during the April 2 final, in which India beat Pakistan Sri Lanka. That’s the highest share of any of the digital media through which ESPN covered the sport, and doesn’t even include the app versions of ESPNcricinfo.

It’s significant that mobile use outweighed desktop use. ESPN claims ESPNcricinfo’s mobile site took 63.6 percent of the global mobile audience in its industry segment - far outweighing the 36.1 percent share ESPNcricinfo claims it took in the desktop web market.

That effect came from Indians, who supplied the largest slice of mobile traffic to ESPNcricinfo (377.3 million page views through the tournament). There are around 700 million mobile phones in use in India - nearly the entire population of 1.15 billion. Many of the handsets are unsophisticated, but broadcasters nevertheless supply subscription audio content. In neighbouring Pakistan, BBC Urdu offered five, two-minute World Cup audio reports every hour for on-demand listening by dial-up during the competition.

July Systems, an LA-based mobile web infrastructure vendor which was contracted by ESPN, SuperSport and other proprietors during the tournament, says it served 74 million mobile page views globally during the final game, over Amazon’s Web Services system.

But, though the region reflected starkly in ESPN’s stats during the tournament, the overall audience for ESPNcricinfo’s mobile site remains small in an all-media context, setting a March 30 record of 1.9 million visitors, compared with 6.5 million on desktop that same day.

The takeaway must be that mobile users kept generating page views by refreshing, but desktop still had more actual unique users.

It’s YouTube’s first deal to live-stream a big global sport - no mere domestic competition, IPL is the largest cricket tournament in the world, forecast to generate $1.6 billion over 10 years. But the deal will include a US blackout because “re-broadcast options will be available” will be available there, the announcement says.

Indeed, just as the International Olympic Committee hosted Beijing 2008 highlights on YouTube for countries which had no television deal, this looks like a gap-plugging, market-building deal, rather than a win of top-tier rights for Google (NSDQ: GOOG). DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) aired last year’s IPL in the U.S. on its $149-a-year Cricket Ticket, and Setanta Sports had shown IPL in the UK but has now collapsed…

That last point means YouTube will be the only network (not even Sky Sports or ESPN) showing IPL to the UK, from where many IPL players are lured by big-money salaries. That’s a significant watershed for both it and the web as a medium, but one which - like September’s first-ever online-only England soccer game - has arisen only because TV rightsholder Setanta left the market.

It’s therefore unclear what Google will have paid for these rights - or, indeed, whether the IPL views it mostly as welcome global promotion. The deal works by Google and the IPL sharing sponsorship revenue…

Already, Google India is clearly hoping to make a killing on ad sales. From the announcement: “The advertising options on YouTube will be available only for a limited number of sponsors over the course of the season. Companies will have the opportunity to sponsor live streamed matches, match re-broadcasts, and ongoing viewership of clips and highlights. Advertisers will be able to advertise on the YouTube homepage, the live stream page, video ads during the match itself amongst several other innovative formats.”

There will be 20 different user-selectable camera feeds, like stumpcam and a view from behind the bowler. Google says it will also add non-live videos including highlights, interviews, pitch-side reports - “an alternative view of the match not available on television or any other media”. And it will use its social network Orkut to host an IPL-branded community supporting live chats with players and team owners, plus competitions and match polls.

IPL chair Lalit Modi, in Telegraph.co.uk, suggests the deal is bigger than that: “This changes the world of sports broadcasting. The internet has changed the lives of everyone and this will do the same for sport.

“We are now taking our event truly global for the first time. Google gives us access to 500 million pairs of eyes every single moment of the day ...  It doesn’t matter if you live in Australia and the games are shown during the middle of the night. Now you will be able to get up in the morning and, if you have an internet connection, watch the action at a time of your choosing and not have to wait for a broadcaster to repeat it.”

If Modi’s being honest, then he seems to be bucking the news business’ current trend of valuing bankable paying audiences more than an audience of advertiser eyeballs: “We are in talks with all broadcasters in the UK but we would rather give it away free (on YouTube) than let some of them make money out of us and the consumer.”

YouTube chief Chad Hurley is also planning to run Formula One social video content on his video site following his personal investment in the U.S. F1 team.

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YouTube had already hosted match highlights for last year’s second IPL season on an existing channel. YouTube has already been testing large-scale live events like a U2 concert and was on Tuesday due to stream the IPL’s pre-season “auction”, in which some 51 players will swap teams.

India’s Sony (NYSE: SNE) Entertainment Television and Singaporean World Sport Group jointly hold domestic and global IPL broadcast rights respectively in a $1.2 billion, 10-year deal, and have re-sold to a patchwork of global players. Willow TV holds North America internet rights.

Now reports say the 59-match, 45-day day competition, which starts March 12, will be broadcast live through YouTube. Though in which territories and on what basis is not clear. It could be a deal to bring the tournament to countries where there is a gap in TV coverage - the UK lost IPL coverage with last year’s collapse of secondary rightsholder Setanta. The International Olympic Committee hosted Beijing 2008 highlights on YouTube for countries which had no television deal. DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) aired last year’s IPL in the US on its $149-a-year Cricket Ticket.

Asked to confirm reports, IPL chair Lalit Kumar Modi tweeted: “Wait and watch for breaking news soon.” YouTube UK told paidContent:UK: “We can’t comment on rumour and speculation.” But Bruce Daisley, the lead for display ads and YouTube at Google in London, is quoted by Marketing mag as saying: “We’re keen to see how the community will take to live sport. There’s a real interest in live events, so we’re excited.”

An event like the IPL could be an important shot in the arm to YouTube’s ad sales. The IPL is not just a domestic Indian cricket tournament but numbers players from around the world and is touring various countries as match hosts, and plans to pay out six percent of an expected $1.6 billion, 10-year income as prize money.

Marketing mag: “YouTube wants to sign a global sponsor and multiple local backers as part of its strategy to make money from the coverage.” Telegraph.co.uk: “Modi told India’s Economic Times at the weekend that he hopes to hold matches in the United States within 18 months.” The paper says “Google will split advertising revenue”, though there’s no confirmation of that.

Mumbai’s Nimbus Communications has won the broadcast rights to BCCI’s games (one day international and test matches) played in India till April 2014 (via TOI). The company had won the same contract in 2006 as well, and holds the telecast rights till March 2010. In 2006, the company paid $612 million (Rs2,722 crore then) for the deal. This time, however, the company is only paying $425 million (Rs1,960 crore), according to the TOI story. This is despite the fact that overall, ad rates as well as ad spends are expected to go up during the four years from 2010.

Sale of media rights is the single biggest source of BCCI’s revenues, so the deal must come as a dampner to India’s richest sports body.

In September, Hindustan Times carried a prescient story about the decline in ratings of one-day cricket.

The story said that even the big India-Pakistan game, which has in the past unfailingly set ratings on fire, clocked a TRP of just 2.6, while India’s games at the Twenty20 World Cup in June averaged a TRP of 4.

In 2008, Set Max reportedly signed a $1.026 billion deal for IPL TV rights for ten years.

Public broadcaster Prasar Bharati has recommended SIS to the ministry of information and broadcasting after narrowing down contenders from an original list of four companies, the report says.

While Prasar Bharati will be the official broadcaster of the mega event, the selected company will be responsible for producing the telecast in high-definition format.

ESPN Star Sports has also bagged the exclusive rights for 17 other markets in Asia, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and Maldives. ESPN has been broadcasting BPL in India since 1995 and the company said the property has enjoyed massive growth in India.

“This renewal underlines our commitment to football fans in India as we continue providing the most compelling content to our viewers and an excellent promotional platform for our business partners,” Manu Sawhney, MD, ESPN Star Sports, said in a statement.

ESPN Star Sports is an equal stakes JV between ESPN Inc. (owned by Walt Disney) and News Corp (NYSE: NWS).

Major League Baseball was held up as an even better model of what the IOC could gain from a more progressive digital policy. Baseball is now driving nearly $200 million directly from subscription revenues to their website, Sir Martin pointed out. If they don’t figure it out, sports businesses will ultimately find themselves selling their broadcast rights for less if they did not meet the changing audience needs.

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Free live webcasts kick off with the Sri Lanka Vs New Zealand match tomorrow afternoon at 2:30 from the India-Sri Lanka-New Zealand tri-series. 

In an email interview with contentSutra, NBC’s VP of digital product strategy and development, Sab Kanaujia, who will also head this business, talks about the exact arrangement with Ten Sports, changing consumer behaviour and how he believes online video consumption in India is about to take off.

This interview will run in two parts. The first part is after the jump.

The release says NBC will own and operate the site. What’s your exact arrangement with Ten Sports?

NBC Universal has become Ten Sports’ exclusive global digital partner. Ten Sports will transfer any existing and future digital rights to its sports programming to NBCU, which will exploit those rights on digital platforms and share revenue with Ten Sports. This arrangement is initially for a year and is extendable upto 2012. Ten Sports will also market digital businesses that NBCU will launch with Ten Sports content to over 75M homes reached by its on-air channels in over 75 territories. NBCU will manage all day-to-day operations. So, tensports.com, which is the main initiative as part of this strategic partnership between the two companies, is run by NBCU (editorial, ad sales, product strategy & development, technical operations, etc.).

NDTV Convergence is also part of this initiative. They’re providing us support with technical operations during live matches. We’re also using their services to prep archival videos. In fact, NDTV is using the same third-generation NBCU technology that we earlier licensed them for their operations while re-launching ndtv.com earlier this year.

The website tensports.com is an old one. What new parts are you introducing?

Tensports.com thus far existed primarily as a corporate Web-site. Now it’s a consumer portal for sports. The experience, therefore, has transformed dramatically.

Our goal is to make the new site India’s premiere, video-rich, sports portal. We have two main video experiences: one for live streaming, and another one for on-demand videos.

The live Webcast will offer consumers in the region an unique and un-paralleled experience. By leveraging the social and interactive elements of the Internet medium, we’re providing some key differentiators compared to the traditional television experience. Fans will be able to watch live cricket matches, simultaneously chat with their Facebook friends & family around the Indian sub-continent & Middle East and discuss the game, watch on-demand highlight clips of key moments of the live game they may have missed, along with interactive stats and scores.

Our product platform for live streaming allows us to take a separate simultaneous live feed, pause & rewind it, and cut highlight clips and post them online with required metadata within minutes of the live action.

The on-demand video experience, on the other hand, is more of a traditional video experience. We’re bringing online several hundred hours of great Ten Sports cricket library content from the past ten years, which will be available for free to fans globally. We’re also in the process of clearing digital rights for cricket videos from eighties and nineties. It’ll be a treat for cricket enthusiasts worldwide.
The site will also offer users latest cricket news, articles and analysis. 

We’ll also offer “quidgets” (quizzes + widgets) - which are cricket video quizzes allowing fun experiences for cricket enthusiasts who can play and share them with their friends.

Lastly, we have plans to offer Web originals like “behind the scenes,” travel blogs & videos, etc, which Ten Sports on-air commentators and production crew will create while they’re, let’s say, in South Africa or Sri Lanka to cover a cricket series. Unlike a traditional on-air linear channel, you don’t have restrictions with programming slot availability on digital, so we can offer users as much content as we can create. Our goal is to ultimately provide sports fans an experience that will allow them to literally “live” each sporting event that Ten Sports covers from different parts of the world.

Audience in today’s digital age is living a multi-platform life. We therefore believe that traditional content production has to adopt and constantly think about three screens (TV, PC & mobile) instead of just one at every step of their planning and execution. We are fortunate that Ten Sports shares NBCU’s multi-platform vision, and is committed to introducing necessary work-flow changes in their current production process to enable this vision.

Is the site going to feature a full-screen experience similar to Hulu? Are you using an advanced compression technology for India where broadband penetration is (relatively) miniscule?

We’re offering a full-screen experience. However, since online video consumption in India is just taking off, and broadband penetration, as you said, is relatively small, we are for now holding off on more advanced technical innovations that we’ve implemented here in the U.S. At launch, we’re encoding videos at

<300kbps to get maximum user coverage. But since we're working off of a very good quality original feed from Ten Sports, even at that low bit-rate, you'll find our live Webcast to be of much better quality compared to what has traditionally been seen in the region.

In the future, we have plans to do adaptive streaming based on user's Internet connection speed. Such dynamic, multiple-rate-encoding of live video streams can provide a user with, say, 256kbps Internet connection, a lower encoded streams compared to live streams to a user on a 2,000kbps connection, who can receive an almost HD quality experience.

With the first match set for tomorrow, how many live matches do you have scheduled for this year?

The beta site is already live, and last week we streamed the two Sri Lanka vs New Zealand T20 cricket matches. The main debut event is the Compaq Cup Tri-Series cricket between India, Sri Lanka and New Zealand starting tomorrow. We’ll be carrying all live cricket matches that Ten Sports has exclusive rights for. The live Webcast schedule is available on the site.

A report in Mint came out last month which mentioned that NBCU was in talks with Dubai-based sports channel Ten Sports for a deal, though it didn’t mention the new sports website. What’s not clear is if the NBC site will be related to NDTV Networks, the Indian TV conglomerate in which NBCU holds a 26 percent stake. NBCU recently opened up a digital solutions business in India, providing its tech infrastructure and experience developed U.S. to local Indian media companies and publishers. It also helped redesign NDTV’s flagship site NDTV.com.

Most of the Indian cricket tournaments have been webcast live for diaspora audiences outside India for a fee, on sites like Willow.tv, Rediff and others, but this is the first time a local Indian site will come out with live and on-demand video for local audiences in a big way. And considering cricket is the dominant sports in India, the site is likely to be cricket heavy, though I hope they do give attention to other sports like hockey (the Indian national sport, btw) and tennis, among others.

IPL’s commercial success and its million dollar contracts for players have been criticised to be a major distraction for cricket players. MCC’s World Cricket Committee recently said that test cricket was on the verge of extinction in most countries, with players considering an IPL contract their ultimate goal. With high monetary rewards for a limited time commitment and a format that is less demanding physically, IPL has skewed incentives for cricket players everywhere and priorities for many.

The DT story points out that one hurdle before stronger ties between IPL and English counties is the England & Wales Cricket Board’s broadcast deal with Sky. The channel has exclusive rights to all cricket played in England, while Multiscreen Media (Sony) is IPL’s official broadcaster.

Starting on 5 June, the cricketing world’s official 20-20 world cup will be watched in 216 countries around the world through content syndications. Venkateish said some 75-80% of revenues from the tournament will come from India ad revenues. The tournament will run through 27 June. India is the defending champions of the trophy. At today’s press conference, ESPN Star Sports officials and the channel’s commentators such as Wasim Akram and Sanjay Manjarekar, went to great lengths to assure everyone that there would be no fatigue factor from the tournament closely following the just concluded Indian Premier League.

The very important question of whether there will be cheerleaders at the official tournament went unanswered. 

Multi Screen Media (formerly Sony (NYSE: SNE) Entertainment Television) will remain the broadcaster, but will have paid a much greater amount for the previlege. A tripartite deal between MSM, the Board of Control for Cricket in India and World Sports Group was announced yesterday. MSM now has telecast rights for nine years and the deal is worth $1.6 billion. Under the earlier deal, MSM would have paid $918 million for the telecast rights and spent $108 million for marketing the tournament. A Mint story says some 80% of this amount will be paid by MSM. Ad rates for key IPL matches already attract a premium and last year semi finals and finals fetched Rs10 lakh for a 10-second spot. On an average, ad spots went for Rs3.5-4 lakh per 10-sec. MSM’s ability to raise the rates to record new levels will be contrained by the current economic environment, but the company must have gauged advertiser interest before signing the deal for a higher amount.

Citing an unnamed BCCI official, Cricinfo reported yesterday that the board will compensate franchisees for additional expenditure incurred due to the shift of venue to South Africa.

With the IPL heading to SA, tour operators expect a lot of traffic in the sector and have started working on packages, reports The Economic Times and Business Standard.

Here’s a timeline of IPL’s troubles.

Photo credit: McClatchy-Tribune Business News

Yesterday, the Mumbai High Court had lifted the injunction on the Board of Control For Cricket in India, or BCCI, allowing the body to discuss television rights with channels other than Multi Screen Media Ltd, the incumbent broadcaster.

Worried about potential losses as the league is pushed out of India, the franchisees of the league are turning to the BCCI, Business Standard reported today.

GCV paid $25,000 for the rights to make a Facebook fantasy cricket game back in April and, of course, bought the rights to produce the portal for the massively popular Indian Premier League in April for $50 million in a 10-year deal that saw it bag the rights to develop the Indian cricket authority’s site bcci.tv.

It’s unclear where he gets the figures from, but LCM’s acting CEO Mark Melville estimates there are “27 million fantasy sports players in the United States alone, with annual revenues between $800 million (£471 million) and $1 billion”. GCV also said it has appointed former CNN International business development executive Alex Chamberlen as chief revenue officer, who spent three years from 2004 as global head of sales for the ESPN-owned Cricinfo.com and was heavily involved in the site’s purchase by ESPN (NYSE: DIS). Release.

Readers will remember that contentSutra had reported earlier about the BCCI and Multi Screen Media (SET) planning a fantasy league in India. Looks like they forgot to register the domain - which was registered by Sandeep Goel for the IFL. I was under the impression that the Indian Fantasy League being developed by “a Canadian company” had referred to the facebook based game from LiveCurrent Media. The Indian Fantasy League against which the petition was filed has already attracted sponsorship from Airtel and ColorPlus, and prizes on offer include 5 Ford Fiesta cars, 10 Videocon TVs, Panasonic ACs, Acer Laptops and Desktops etc. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the case comes up for hearing next on June 10th.

But why is Rediff to blame? They appear to have been unnecessarily caught up in this controversy - we’ve received a clarification from them stating that they merely provided domain registration services as a part of Rediff Business Solutions, and have no control over the domains registered or allocated - that lies with the Central Registrar. They’ll be filing a response regarding this case, and believe (I think rightly so) that they can’t be held liable for a case essentially against Sandeep Goel for indianfantasyleague.com. At the same time, wire agency PTI appears to have added to the confusion - their report claims that Sandeep Goel is the owner of Rediff.com (NSDQ: REDF).

The site also has news content, columns, scorecards, wallpapers and other content. It just appears that IPL coverage is being repackaged for the Royal Challengers. As a fan, when I click on “Scorecard” I want the scorecard of the last RC match, not the last match in the IPL. I want team updates, exclusive team interviews, what the coach thought at the end of the last game. If there are players going away on international duty, I want to know how their experience has been in the team. The asides are also important. And in this case, the sites columns appear to be syndicated.

Incidentally, WATblog has a traffic comparison of how the IPL websites are doing.

For more than a week now, we’ve been working on verifying many conflicting inputs on how the IPL new media rights are being sold. Now we hear that the rights for the MENA region, the Americas and the UK are being sold separately. As per sources, all will be clear latest by tomorrow. An official announcement is expected soon, but I wonder if it’s a little too late - the rights are being sold just 2-3 days before the tournament begins.

A few additional clauses regarding online media, apart from the details that we have covered earlier: It appears that photos can only be used if they appear as still images, and cannot be used to support a so-called on-line match-tracking report, audio or text based commentary service. Also, no online use or publication or syndication of still photographic images is allowed without the express prior written consent of IPL. And “Only representatives of licensed/authorised media licensees (licensed by IPL) may make sound and/or image recordings of any Match.” What if a spectator has a camera phone?

Clearly the guidelines seek to restrict online coverage of the IPL…either that, or generate a media controversy before the IPL launches. I would have thought that the IPL would have sought to push for as much online coverage as possible, given that the league is still in its infancy. Updates expected today, so watch this space.

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