Denied the opportunity to telecast match highlights of the high-profile India-Pakistan cricket series, sports broadcaster ESPN-Star Sports (ESS) said on Friday it was "prepared to use all other avenues, including legal option", against public broadcaster Prasar Bharati.
"We have an existing contract with Prasar Bharati, which clearly spells out that they have to provide us one-hour highlight package for every cricketing day, in case they get rights," ESS Managing Director R C Venkatesh said.
Venkatesh said ESS has written to Prasar Bharati, asking it to honour the "contract."
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"We will wait till the middle of next week. If they don't respond positively by then, we will use other options, including legal action, to have the contract honoured," he said.
Prasar Bharati has refused to provide highlights to any party. After being handed exclusive rights for the series by the Madras High Court on Thursday, Prasar Bharati CEO K S Sarma said there was "no question" of it providing special match highlights to any broadcaster.
"We are not planning to do this, nor are we bound by any obligation to do so," Sarma said, adding the public broadcaster just had a one-way contract with ESS which enables it get Live feed for one-day matches and highlights for Test matches in case ESS got rights.
As per the contract, "DD will offer to ESS, one hour daily highlights package for both One-Day International and Test matches at Rs five lakh per highlight for year one and this fee of Rs five lakh will be increased by 10 per cent for each subsequent year."
This, as per the contract, happens in case Prasar Bharati gets the rights.
Interestingly, ESS had not pressed the issue when Prasar Bharati had received rights for 31 cricketing days last year, involving India's Test matches against Australia and South Africa and a one-day against Pakistan.
