With Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) cancelling its licence for telecast rights of Team India's matches played at home, broadcaster Neo Sports has been forced to re-brand its exclusive cricket channel as an all sports channel.
The broadcaster has renamed its Neo Cricket channel as Neo Prime, so as to telecast other sports on the channel.
"The reality is that we don't have the BCCI rights anymore. So long as we had the BCCI rights, we also covered domestic matches to some extent, so it made sense to have a dedicated exclusive cricket channel.
"But now we realise that it may not be useful to have a 24x7 cricket channel. Therefore, it makes more sense to position it this way," Neo Sports broadcast (TV operations) chief operating officer Prasanna Krishnan told agencies.
BCCI scrapped the contract with its broadcast rights holder Nimbus Communications, the promoter of Neo Sports, last December for defaulting on payments and forfeited a bank guarantee amount of Rs 2,000 crore.
Nimbus had signed a four-year deal with BCCI in October 2009 for Rs 2,000 crore. On if Neo Sports could have launched a new channel without sacrificing its exclusive cricket channel, Krishnan said, "Cricket can also be telecast on Neo Prime or Neo Sports. We thought we would go with this strategy rather than launch a third channel at this time."
Neo Cricket was the first to have a round-the-clock cricket-centric content and its competitors followed suit.
Broadcast major ESPN-Star has its exclusive channel for cricket - Star Cricket, while Zee Enterprises operated Ten Sports has Ten Cricket.