Supreme Court rejects Star Sports plea

The Supreme Court on Friday held it mandatory for sports broadcasters to share "clean feed" of cricket matches and other sporting events of national importance with public broadcaster Prasar Bharati without advertisements and sponsor logos.

A bench of Justices A K Sikri and Prafulla C Pant dismissed a plea of Star Sports (India) Pvt Ltd which contended that it would not be possible to provide clean feed of cricket matches to the public broadcaster as the channel itself gets feed containing commercial advertisements from the organisers -the ICC.

The controversy is over displaying logos of the event sponsors, known as 'On-Screen Credits'. Such logos appear on screen at the time of featuring replays or shown while depicting players' statistics, scoreboard, match summary and graphs etc.

Terming logos as advertisements, the bench held that feed shared must not contain logos or any other advertisements. Star Sports acquired exclusive broadcasting rights for all matches in India from ICC and it receives live feed from ICC which is broadcast by it and shared with Prasar Bharati.

It contended that the company had no control over the nature of feed provided by the organisers and it could not remove the commercials attached with the feed.