The dream run of the Premier League Soccer continues even before it started. After staging a successful round of player and franchisee auction which saw a splurge of Rs 150 crores,unheard of in Indian football and grabbing worldwide media attention, the league has become a hot football property.
3 mainstream channels are fighting it out for the broadcast rights of PLS-1. They are ESPN, TEN Action and Sony Set Max. ESPN rightly calls itself a worldwide leader in sports.
TEN Action is a dedicated football channel which has South Asian rights for UEFA Champions League, Europa League and I-League and is obviously quite popular. Sony Max is the channel which broadcasts the lucrative IPL.
However, Sony Max will be beaming the IPL during the same period as PLS and will thus loose out on the bid. Ten Action has sufficient experience in Indian football but their broadcast quality is not as good as ESPN.
The deal is thus heavily tilted towards ESPN who have a massive presence in India. They have offered Rs 15 crore for the rights.
It is to be noted that ESPN used to broadcast IFA Shield until a couple of years ago and thus have an old relationship with IFA which might work in their favour too.
i would like to comment that the IFN have a very good logo and that side picture with nationalized flag colours.if they could be use their indian ASHOK CHAKRA as well as they can then it will deffenetly attract indians to this beautyful unknown game.