Doordarshan to telecast fourth Sri Lanka ODI live

The fourth and final one-day international between India and Sri Lanka, at Visakhapatnam, on Saturday will be telecast live on Doordarshan following a Delhi high court directive to Nimbus Communication to provide live feed.

A bench, comprising Justices Vikramjit Sen and J P Singh, passed the order on Thursday after Nimbus' counsel, Gopal Jain, mentioned the matter before it, seeking protection against the show cause notice issued by the Centre on Wednesday.

Nimbus offered to provide live feed of the match to Prasar Bharti with a rider that the Centre will not take any action or decision as per the show cause notice, which states that their license will be suspended if they do not provide live feed of the match.

After the Centre gave an undertaking that it will not take any action, the court directed the government not to take any decision or action till March 9, the next date of hearing.

The court also issued notices to the Centre and Prasar Bharati on a petition filed by Nimbus challenging the ordinance, which makes it mandatory for private broadcasters to share live feed with Prasar Bharati.

Earlier in the day, Nimbus had approached the court seeking protection from the Centre's alleged threat to cancel its license if it did not respond to the government's show cause notice by Thursday.

The Delhi high court had earlier cleared the decks for the telecast of the India-West Indies cricket series on Doordarshan, allowing it to show the matches seven minutes after the live telecast on Neo Sports, which has the exclusive telecast rights for cricket matches being played in India till March 2010.

However, the court allowed All India Radio to broadcast the matches live.

This interim arrangement was put in place by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul while hearing a petition by Nimbus Communications Ltd., which owns Neo Sports, challenging the Information and Broadcasting Ministry's uplinking guidelines.

The January 19 guidelines asked Neo Sports to share the live feed of the series with Doordarshan and AIR.

Under the interim arrangement, Neo Sports had to provide the feed seven minutes late and without commercials.