The Sri Lanka Cricket governing body has awarded its broadcast and production rights for games played in Sri Lanka to Indian subcontinent pay-television broadcaster Ten Sports in a seven-year deal running through to 2020, according to the Daily Mirror newspaper.
Sri Lanka Cricket secretary Nishantha Ranatunga said Ten Sports was awarded the contract following “lengthy deliberations” and negotiations with several interested parties that had bid for the production rights.
Ten Sports will pay $60.373m (€46.441m) in total for the television rights to all of Sri Lanka’s home games, with $25.5m of this figure being spent on India’s tour of the country in 2017.
The production part of the contract has been valued at $14-15m, with Ten Sports also agreeing to donate $40,000 per year over the term of the deal to aid the development of Sri Lankan domestic cricket.
Ranatunga said: “This year, we called for separate tenders for production and TV rights for the first time. What we wanted was to see if we could demand better quality in production and also probe the possibility of a better deal for SLC financially. The figures quoted by the other bidders were higher than we expected. Ten Sports had anyway offered the best bid for the TV broadcast rights, so SLC obviously decided to award it to Ten Sports for another term.”