News channels drop boycott threat

The News Broadcasters Association (NBA), the umbrella body for major Indian television news channels, has dropped its threat to boycott the Indian Premier League (IPL) after a "successful meeting" with Lalit Modi, the IPL commissioner, on Wednesday night.

"There is no question of a boycott now," Chintamani Rao, the spokesman for NBA, told Cricinfo. "We have reached an agreement with IPL on the two main issues that needed to be discussed - accreditation and access to match footage. These issues were discussed, and also concerns from the IPL side."

It is learned that the IPL, which was facing a news blackout for the Twenty20 tournament starting Friday, has climbed down significantly to assuage the NBA's concerns. Apparently, the IPL will now provide news channels with around four minutes of free match footage instead of the 30 seconds that was offered previously. Besides, the ban on channels using the footage in archival form has been lifted, with the IPL allowing an archival window of one year.

Rao, who is also the chief executive of the Times Now channel, said that the BCCI's accreditation rules will be followed for the IPL. This means that each channel will be given accreditation for one set of crew (journalist and cameraman) at each venue. The IPL had specified on Tuesday that only one pair representing an entire electronic media group would be given accreditation at each venue.

The NBA, based in New Delhi, includes leading news broadcasters such as TV Today, NDTV, Times Global Broadcasting Company, TV18, Global Broadcast News Limited and Zee News.

A statement released by the NBA on Tuesday night had warned of a boycott. It said that the NBA had sought clarifications from the IPL but, instead of receiving a response from either Modi or any of the other members of the IPL's governing council, it received a reply from an official of the Sony Network, which along with World Sports Group, had bought the TV rights for the IPL.

The statement said the NBA's questions didn't fetch a satisfactory response as Sony was "not in a position to discuss matters other than access to footage, and that any offer Sony could make in that regard was limited within the framework of its contract with IPL." On Wednesday, Rao had said that "unless practical considerations are taken care of, it's not possible to cover the IPL".