DD being unfair, says Stracon

NEW DELHI, MAY 7: The Stracon vs Prasar Bharati saga looks unlikely to end, with the former accusing DD of having lost its impartiality. Managing Director of Stracon, Siddhartha Ray, said yesterday that instead of being an umpire, DD had become a player and had got involved in a fight between two commercial rivals. He alleged that Nimbus, a former member of the sports consortium, went to “extraordinary lengths” to see that Stracon did not do the marketing for the World Cup, which begins on May 14.

Ray also suggested that the quality of the telecast would suffer because his company was no longer involved in the customisation — which means that the commentary team of Imran Khan, Ravi Shastri, Geoff Boycott and Kirti Azad will no longer be doing duty, and WorldTel and CSI will not be handling the production. He said DD’s earlier mandate to Stracon, according to the September 21 contract, was to maximise the product.

“Now their priority has changed to maximising the revenue. That’s their problem,” he said, while distributing copies of a letter written by prime rival Nimbus to a Mumbai advertising agency offering to do a series of 11 programmes leading up to the live telecasts. Ray said if DD wanted to match their standard, it would have to fork out an additional Rs 7-8 crore, otherwise it could take the international feed without Hindi commentary.

He said he had written a month ago to the Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, to protest the “whispering campaign” against Stracon and demanded an inquiry to clear their name, but had got no reply. He also said that in the attempt to clean the system in DD, Stracon was being victimised.