The Hindu Business Line : Sports not game enough for channels

SPORTS channels seem to be on sticky wicket. On the face of it, the three major groups -- Ten Sports/DD Sports, ESPN-Star Sports and SET Max are likely to face a quaint situation of having a lot of sports programming, but little chance of scoring the winning goal.

The advertising industry has already started painting a bleak future for sports channels. Their reasoning: Only cricket makes money, that too only when India plays. "There is no denying that the TRP ratings are much higher when India is involved, but the ratings drop drastically when India is not playing'' said Ms Pratibha Vinayak, Senior Business Director, Carat India.

This is proved by the fact that ESPN-Star has already roped in some advertisers for the forthcoming India-England series.

In the near future, Ten Sports has rights to all the cricket matches to be played in Sri Lanka, Sharjah and Morocco, DD Sports has rights to all international cricket matches played in India, ESPN-Star Sports holds rights to all international cricket played in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England, West Indies, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and Bangladesh, while SET Max has rights to ICC Cricket.

However, a quick peek into the itineraries of the various sports channels shows that till the end of December 2003 besides participating in the cricket World Cup, India is scheduled to visit England and New Zealand. The problem that the channels would face is that the rest of the matches concern other cricket-playing nations that are unlikely to generate interest in India.

So, where does the moolah come in?

According to Mr Praveen Kumar who runs a media tracking outfit, Current Opinion Future Trends (Coft), "Most of the channels will have problems with generating advertising revenues. With so many channels, there is going to be a problem of inventory pile-up.''

Media planners said that since sports primarily attracted male viewers, the advertising pie for such products was anything between Rs 350 crore and Rs 400 crore. "Increasingly, there is a shift in spends by these categories from sports to news channels. There has been so much happening in terms of news that advertising on news channels is growing at the cost of sports channels,'' said a senior media planner.

Moreover, each channel has its unique problem. Ten Sports launched exclusively for the South Asian sub-continent needs events suited for the region. ESPN-Star Sports does not have enough of cricket with India, while Sony has only the World Cup acquired at a high price.

Industry sources say that as cost of acquisition of sporting events have skyrocketed, channels would really have problems recovering. "Sony, for instance, is believed to have paid over Rs 1,200 crore for the World Cup rights for a period of six years. Just to break-even, the channel would have to earn at least Rs 200 crore, which is definitely an uphill climb,'' says an industry watcher.

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Sports not game enough for channels