Minutes before Indian badminton star PV Sindhu’s Paris Olympics journey ended in a tough pre-quarter final, this writer got an angry phone call from a relative.

“Why the hell is DD Sports not showing badminton matches live online?”

This was despite state broadcaster Doordarshan handing out “live” updates on its X account, and DD Sports – Prasar Bharti’s free-to-air television channel – having telecasting rights for all the India matches. And because the match was digitally beamed to 3.7 crore online viewers via JioCinema along with a larger bouquet of other Olympic events.

“Why are you lying about live coverage, dear,” this writer then asked a friend, who is a senior DD official. “It’s live,” he insisted, but one must have a “DD Free Dish”. 

A similar response was given by Prasar Bharati chairman Navneet Sehgal to a journalist who called it “shocking” to have to subscribe to Jio as it was a matter of “national teams”. “It is on DD Sports which is available on DD Free Dish. I think you are watching it on DD Sports on Tata Sky,” he said, requesting the journalist to get DD Free Dish installed in her house and watch the event for “free”.

DD Free Dish is a free direct-to-home service which requires a separate antenna and set top box to stream. But getting it is a struggle. Several former and current employees of Prasar Bharati said the pandemic had compelled many viewers to shift to free-to-air television, but that they changed their mind after an unfavourable response from DD marketing staff and helplines.

A YouGov survey had last month pointed out that 55 percent of Indian viewers will consume Paris Olympics related developments through social media while 47 percent will stream it online. But still, DD was far behind the game compared to Jio.

Though the seeds for this were sown years ago.

‘Sabotage’

The size of India’s population lures broadcasters from all over the world.

But sabotage ostensibly began in 2012, according to a senior officer, when two former DD top officials joined a leading private channel, with their ability to identify loopholes in the Prasar Bharati or DD manuals. The channel went on to bag telecast rights for a mega sporting event in 2014 for the first time.

Up until that point, the Supreme Court’s directives requiring all private parties to share national interest livestreams with DD had a revenue-sharing mechanism that favoured commercial satellite channels, 70:30. Cricket matches were the main context for this. 

But since Prasar Bharati was a member of the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, live-streaming rights for events like the Olympics, Asian, or Commonwealth Games were mostly granted to national broadcasters. For this reason, in 2012, the London Olympic Games were live-streamed on the DD platform. 

All of that, however, changed soon after.

The last straw for the national broadcaster came through an August 2017 Supreme Court decision that ruled in favour of ESPN and Star Sports. The bench stated that Prasar Bharati received the live feed from content rights owners “only for the purpose of re-transmission of signals on its own terrestrial and direct-to-home networks and not to cable operators” in accordance with the Sports Act. DD National used to broadcast all of the Indian cricket team’s limited overs matches because it had the broadcasting rights from ESPN and Star. However, these massive media behemoths used to incur enormous income losses as a result of the growing number of cable networks in India. As a result, the private players had approached the Supreme Court.

It was a moment that nearly spelt DD’s surrender before private players as the verdict went unchallenged. The Union government was unable to enter this arena and legislate in a way that would ensure events of social and cultural significance remain accessible to audiences without monopolisation by media players – either public or private.

According to government estimates from 2019, Doordarshan, which runs 34 satellite channels and has 50 million households using its free dish free-to-air satellite (albeit there is no data to support that claim), is the biggest broadcaster in terms of scale.

But despite that, Reliance Industries’ Jio, which boasts 460 million customers and offers streaming services under the JioCinema brand, is the obvious winner in the Olympic streaming case.

Cricket, the market leader

It should come as no surprise that the Indian sports broadcasting market is primarily driven by cricket. For example, the IPL, which, since its inaugural season in 2008, has continued to grow into a massive domestic event. 

Sony won the first media rights auction with a 10-year deal worth Rs 8,200 crore, which was a comparatively good result for a start-up competition. Since then, the tournament’s economic worth has increased dramatically – the BCCI earned a total of Rs 48,390 crore for the 2023–2027 cycle at the most recent auction.

And this year, Disney Star’s decision to air World Cup matches for free helped the network attract a record-breaking viewership.

Disney Star had purchased the linear television rights for Rs 23,575 crore, but it lost out greatly even though it kept the domestic TV rights. Its prior agreement with the BCCI had included worldwide rights to the competition on all media, meaning rights for all platforms like satellite and digital to only one company.

Viacom18 had placed a winning bid of Rs 23,758 crore for TV and internet rights in major cricket countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and South Africa, as well as the league’s exclusive digital rights on the Indian subcontinent. Late last year, it had acquired the global digital and TV rights to Indian national team cricket, riding high on the success of its IPL debut. 

The BCCI received a five-year deal of Rs 5,963 crore, which solidified the Reliance-owned company’s standing as a significant broadcaster in Indian cricket.

Monopoly and merger

Similar to the Indian telecom market, which is monopolised by Jio, Airtel, and Idea, there’s a good chance that Disney and Reliance’s proposed $8.5 billion joint venture, announced earlier this year, will solidify their dominant position in the sports broadcasting industry.

In fact, the agreement will combine the two companies’ streaming and television businesses, including JioCinema from Reliance and Disney’s Star TV networks as well as Hotstar’s digital service. Disney’s position in India will be protected while the merger would also allow it to split operations and content expenses with Reliance. 

However, all of this can have an impact on those who own sports rights. The competition will be weaker. In fact, the BCCI stands to lose a great deal of money if there are fewer bidding battles. 

But Prasar Bharati, which would not claim broadcast rights, is likely to remain the same.