Neo Sports Broadcast, a division of the Nimbus Communications agency, has elected to take the distribution of its Neo Sports and Neo Prime pay-television channels in-house.
Neo has said it will not extend its current cable distribution agreement with Indian distribution company MSMD, which is due to expire on March 31. As of April 1, Neo will distribute its channels through its own in-house team.
Neo granted cable distribution rights to MSMD in 2010, but has also continued to sign agreements with direct-to-home and other digital platforms.
“This is a step in the right direction to further build our business keeping in mind the emerging digital landscape,” Dilip Sharan, executive vice-president of distribution platforms for Neo, told the BestMediaInfo.com website.
“The suggestive regulatory approach combined with digitalisation clearly points that future distribution deals will be dictated by the relevant content that is made available to various audiences and the ability to work with the platforms keeping in mind the business issues and not entirely on the strength of the channels size in the bouquet, a prevalent practice in the analogue era. Our cable distribution deal with MSMD made better commercial sense in the analogue environment.”