The Bangladesh Cricket Board in an emergency meeting on Tuesday relaxed the clause for its television broadcast and marketing rights to attract new
bidders, said BCB president AHM Mustafa Kamal after the meeting.
The BCB, earlier, had put a clause that a company with minimum five years experience in broadcasting international cricket matches will be eligible to bid for the TV rights, starting from November 2012 till April 2016.
But after seeing very minimal interest, with only two companies buying the schedule papers, the board decided to relax the clause.
‘We feel that this clause is not allowing us to get a good response from interested parties,’ Kamal said in a news conference.
‘Now if a couple of parties make a consortium and one of them have the experience of five years then they can bid for the deal. TV broadcasting is made through three components – productions, broadcasting and marketing – and it can be managed by different companies.
‘At the beginning we were very strict regarding this issue as we thought that we would have a huge amount of pressure,’ he added.
Kamal hoped that after this relaxation the board will receive a good response from the interested parties and can make the deal by September 16.
It was learnt that Ten Sports and Indian sports event licensing company Sporty Solutionz only bought the tender documents. Of the two, Sporty Solutionz was in charge of international broadcasting of the Bangladesh Premier League.
The same company also telecasted the recently-held Sri Lankan Premier League. Both BPL and SLPL were internationally broadcasted on ESPN-Star Sports among other channels.
The BCB faces a race against time to ink the new TV deal as they have the home series against the West Indies looming closer.
If they are unable to sign a deal before the West Indies series, they have to bear the production cost for the series, which officials said would be no less than $2 million.
Kamal hoped that the BCB would earn a respectable amount of money from the new TV deal though he refused to put his expectation on figure.
‘We expect to earn $1 billion from the TV deal,’ Kamal said jokingly before quickly going to back-foot.
‘We all know a recession is going on in world economy and for some countries it’s a double recession so we have to be realistic,’ he said.
The BCB sold its previous TV rights to Nimbus Sports International for a staggering $56.88 million in October 2006, but a significant amount of money is still outstanding.
The Board had already initiated a legal action against Nimbus by going for arbitration as the company used various loopholes in the agreement to avoid making any payment.
Nimbus has been disqualified for bidding this time after BCB had added a clause in their schedule that any companies having a financial dispute with the Board are ineligible for taking part in the tender process.
Courtesy of New Age
