Bangladesh Cricket Board is planning to launch subscription-based apps to live to stream their international matches.
For the first time since 2001, a Test match involving Tigers wasn’t broadcasted on TV in Bangladesh. The last time a Bangladesh Test wasn’t shown was back in 2001 during the Asian Test Championship when one of the matches wasn’t shown in Bangladesh.
For Bangladeshi fans, the series is only available on the ICC’s streaming channel for a subscription fee.
“We are planning to bring apps because our digital platform is getting stronger like Facebook and YouTube and we want to come digitally and create a platform for our own broadcast,” BCB director Ismail Haider told The Daily Sun on Friday.
“Look, the world is going digital and we have to understand it. Look, in the IPL the rights were sold at 23 Thousand Crores (TV rights) and 20 Thousand Crores (digital rights). So it’s almost 50-50 as far as digital rights are concerned,” he said.
“In Bangladesh, it is yet to get popular. But surely it will get popular with time and at that point, we will use the digital platform and at one point BCB will go for subscription-based digital (broadcast). We have to take steps as per the situation,” he said.
“We wanted to show the series on our digital platform but because we don’t have geo fencing we could not do it because we don’t have our own YouTube channel and apps we could not do it otherwise we would have liked to show it by ourselves,” he added.
Last year, the Bangladesh VS Australia T20I series wasn’t aired in Australia due to a lack of interest.
This time round it was a blackout after T-Sports or Gazi TV, the Bangladeshi channels that have been showing Bangladesh’s entire international cricket in recent years didn’t land a deal with TSM.
Both channels have reportedly bought the BCB’s broadcasting rights for 2021-23 from Ban Tech, who had initially bought it from the board for $19.07 million last year.
