The Star India broadcast subsidiary of media company 21st Century Fox will spend Rs200bn (€2.4bn/$3.3bn) in the next three to five years as part of a major overhaul of its sports division, according to the Business Standard newspaper.
The newspaper said that Star’s strategy would focus on rights acquisition in sports properties outside of cricket.
The broadcaster’s objectives will be underpinned by a complete revamp of its sports channel portfolio.
Star will retire the ESPN brand name, along with its cricket-dedicated Star Cricket channel, to offer six sports channels – Star Sports 1 to 4 and two high-definition channels.
Sanjay Gupta, Star’s chief operating officer, said that the decision to scrap Star Cricket was taken as having a dedicated channel for a sport which has so much content available was affecting the broadcaster’s image.
Instead Star Sports 1 will concentrate on international cricket matches in which India is one of the competing teams. About 65 per cent of its content will be cricket-based and in English.
Star Sports 2 will offer cricket 50 to 60 per cent of the time, including action from the domestic Ranji Trophy, university and women’s cricket and international matches that don’t feature India.
Star Sports 3 will replicate Star Sports 1 content, but in Hindi. This will be the first time a Hindi-language sports channel is offered in the Indian market and Gupta said its success will be monitored with a view to creating separate regional language sports channels in Tamil, Bengali, Marathi and Kannada.
Star Sports 4 will concentrate on other sports include international football, European club football, badminton, tennis and Formula One motor racing.
Gupta said: “Through this move, for instance in 2014, we will be able to double our cricket content through the various Star Sports channels. For instance, we used to show very limited amount of international cricket where India was not playing.”