NEW DELHI: Prasar Bharati, managing Doordarshan, seems to be on a roll. After landing the Indo-Pak cricket telecast rights "for free", the pubcaster is out to mop up revenue from news channels for usage of cricket video clips.
 

Prasar Bharati CEO KS Sarma confirmed to Indiantelevision.com that some news channels have agreed to pay for the cricket clips that have been used by them in excess of the free footage allowed.

The channels that have agreed to do so include NDTV, Aaj Tak, ESPN and Zee. A DD source said, “First day’s mop up itself would come to about Rs 600,000.” To avoid disputes regarding actual use of footage, the video clipping recording of each channel is being maintained by DD, while the monitoring is being done by TAM, which undertook a similar activity during the last Olympics."
 
 

Sarma had written letters to all channel heads informing them of the terms and conditions for use of cricket match footage just before the first Test match started in Mohali on 8 March.

The terms and conditions allow 30 seconds of free usage of clippings for news bulletins, subject to a ceiling of two minutes a day. The terms, however, prohibit bulletins being positioned and promoted as cricket match programmes. In reality, every news channel has got a cricket special programme for which footage is important.

Prasar Bharati has also supplied details of the footage used by various channels, which are as under:

NDTV India - 280 minutes
Star News - 244 minutes
Headlines Today - 181 minutes
Sahara Samay - 177 minutes
NDTV 24 x 7 - 176 minutes
Zee News - 160 minutes
Aaj Tak - 157 minutes