News broadcasters threaten IPL blackout

The Indian media's rocky relations with the Indian Premier League have taken a downward turn with the News Broadcasters Association (NBA), whose members control the major national news channels, deciding to put its coverage of the IPL on hold from Tuesday midnight until there is a resolution to problems related to coverage it had raised with league officials.

"As far as we are concerned, two issues need to be sorted out before we can go ahead with IPL coverage," Annie Joseph, the Association's secretary general, told Cricinfo. "One relates to access to footage and the other to accreditation guidelines."

It's understood that the channels are unhappy about the exhorbitant rates that are being charged for news clips and also the stipulation that footage can't be used in archival form.

A statement released by the NBA on Tuesday night said it sought clarifications from the IPL but, instead of receiving a response from either Lalit Modi, the IPL's chairman and commissioner, or any of the other members of the IPL's governing council, it instead 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."

"As Sony was by its own admission neither authorized nor competent to deal with the subject comprehensively, and moreover may reasonably be assumed to have a direct conflict of interest in extending use rights to television news channels, it is unacceptable to us to deal with them in this matter," the NBA said.

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