Sanjay Gupta, the chief operating officer of the Star India broadcast division of media conglomerate News Corporation, has criticised the Indian government for supporting regulations imposed by the country’s telecommunications watchdog, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, on the domestic sports media market.
Gupta said that the current caps on television subscription prices as well as regulations that force pay-television broadcasters to share coverage of events of “national importance” with public-service broadcaster Prasar Bharati are stifling growth in the Indian sports media market.
“A price cap is never good for the long-term health of a business but it is especially absurd in the context of sports, where the market we operate in is truly global, where the acquisition costs for rights reflects a global market,” he said. “What is even more absurd is that a news channel, a general entertainment channel, an education channel and a sports channel are all capped at the same level, without any linkage to the underlying cost of content or the relevance of its shelf life. Shockingly, Star Sports, which has the most compelling portfolio of content in the country, can charge no more than the country’s weakest sports channel with practically no sports on it.”
Gupta said: “To make matters worse, the government has mandated that the most expensive sports events are events of national importance that need to be made available to the public broadcaster – who in turn not only retransmits an unencrypted signal to all its subscribers for free, but also makes it available to private platforms to carry the content under a statutorily mandated ‘must carry’ law. So even as you are making no effort to ensure wider coverage for all sports for the long term, you are killing the economics of the sports broadcaster by forcing it to share the most popular content today without adequate compensation and also legitimising piracy by permitting access to sports content by platforms for free.”