A few days ago, Indiatimes 58888, the mobile division of Times Internet Ltd*, announced the licensing of exclusive mobile rights for the ICC World Cup 2011 from Reliance Communications for the Indian market. The right acquired include mobile content services including SMS, voice & video alerts, live audio commentary, mobile content downloads and 2G and 3G services. From our conversations with other VAS companies in the space, the sense we got was that RCOM was struggling to sell the rights because it was pricing it too high; of course, this could well be a biased take. We had a quick chat with Ajay Vaishnavi, Director (Telecom), Indiatimes, on whether it is worth it to acquire Cricket rights, on SMS rights when Cricket scores don't come under copyright, and the state of Indiatimes' SMS revenues: What are you planning to do with the rights? Reliance has the global content rights and we've picked up the rights for India. This covers rights across text, audio, video clips, all formats of USSD, SMS, IVR, Ringtones, CRBT (theme song) and every thing related to the ICC Cricket World Cup. We've got everything except the live video streaming. Those are rights not with Reliance, since they're a part of the broadcasting rights. (ED: the press release adds that "Other services to be offered by TIL include World Cup theme as Ring Back Tone, Cricket Trivia & Predicta-based contests, Post Match Analysis and Mobile Marketing advertisements.") What do you carry on text - because Cricket scores…
