live, uninterrupted feed of cricket matches will now be telecast on Doordarshan, thanks to Supreme Court, which in a judgment on Friday held that any private broadcaster supplying live feed of sports events to Prasar Bharati must supply "clean feed" free of all commercials and logos of sponsors.
The judgment came as a setback to Star Sports India Private limited, which is mandated under the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Act, 2007 to share live feed of sport events without advertisements. Prasar Bharati had objected to Star Sports on April 6, 2013 not to show on-screen credits of its sponsors which amounted to commercial advertisements, that violated Section 3 of the Act.
But Star maintained that the on-screen credits which appear alongside the graphs and statistics of the match and players displayed throughout the match is part of the "world feed" it received from the content provider International Cricket Council and it is this content that is beamed by it to all service providers including direct to home, cable operators and Prasar Bharati. This argument failed to convince the Delhi High Court that dismissed Star's plea and ordered clean feed to be supplied to the public broadcaster as mandated by the Act.
Dismissing Star's appeal, the apex bench of Justices AK Sikri and Prafulla C Pant said, "Radio as well as television broadcasting of Prasar Bharati is free of cost. It is for this reason that the law in the form of Sports Act is enacted in order to ensure that such sporting events of national importance are made available to every citizen of this country, irrespective of his/her financial conditions." Moreover, the Court held that of feed is provided minus advertisements it will enable Prasar Bharati to enter into arrangement with advertisers and charge accordingly as its reach is the widest in the country.