(Cricinfo)- A RADICAL shake-up to the existing ecosystem of selling television rights is under discussion by Full Members and will be examined further at the ICC’s annual conference in Edinburgh later this month.The change, one part of a broader re-working of cricket’s international calendar, is aimed at giving member boards better value for their television rights in overseas markets. If implemented, a new model could see boards take greater control than broadcasters of monetising the value of bilateral cricket, as well as its promotion and visibility in untapped markets.
The crux of the proposal, made at the ICC chief executives committee meeting in April, is this: once the current cycle of television rights ends for respective Full Members, each board will continue to sell rights for its home territory and avail of those profits entirely as is already the case.
But each board will place the rights to telecast its home series in overseas markets in a common pool into which other boards will also put those rights. The rights in the common pool will then be sold collectively as bundles by a committee of Full Members and the profits will be divided and distributed in certain percentages to the contributing boards.
For example, if New Zealand are hosting India, NZC retains the ability to sell television rights for broadcast within New Zealand, but places the rights for broadcast in India and the rest of the world in the common pool; that pool already contains the overseas broadcast rights of other bilateral series such as, for example, Australia’s tour of New Zealand or Sri Lanka’s tour of the West Indies. So if a broadcaster wants to telecast India’s tour of New Zealand in India, it may have to purchase a bundle from this pool – in a similar way as the ICC sells its own events as part of a bundle – that also contains rights to the Australia-New Zealand series or the Sri Lanka-West Indies one, and it may have to mandatorily telecast those series in India as well.
This will be a change from the current system whereby the home board sells rights – either home and away or both – to a particular broadcaster and then leaves it to that broadcaster to on-sell the rights for overseas markets to other broadcasters. In some cases, boards have sold rights for a particular overseas market to an overseas broadcaster who has no interest in telecasting a series not involving the broadcaster’s home country. Under this new model, a committee composed of member board officials would be in charge of the on-selling.
ESPNcricinfo understands that the ECB floated the proposal and is currently part of a committee working on it, along with CSA, CA, NZC and the PCB. The proposal is currently at a conceptual stage, with details of how and what bundles will be sold, thin.