Cricket watching on TV in India is a big annoyance now-a-days. With commercial interests reigning supreme on the Cricket Board as well as the Broadcasters mind, its no more cricket watching with ads in between the overs; its advertising watching with cricket in between! Live!!
Every possible inch of the screen is being used to generate revenues or tell us something.
Sample the number of thing on screen nowadays (atleast in the recent T20 and India-Australia series).
a. The big and ugly channel logo.
b. The BCCI logo.
c. The horizontal advertising banner.
d. The advertising banner during slow motion
e. Don’t know what they call it – But the ugly banner on 2 sides of the screen. 3 sides sometimes.
f. The sponsors logo on the various scorecards / statistics banners. Sometime its just the sponsors Ad/message and no statistics.
If you are watching the match on TataSky then there is more…
g. VC# right in the center of the screen.
h. Scroller urging you to dial in and report piracy to ‘TataSky’ or Scroller advertising a new sports package.
i. ‘Active Sports’ logo urging you to click a button and go to the Active sports section
j. Yellow envelope icon on top telling you there is a message for you (mostly advertising a special package or movie).
and God forbid if it happens…
k. The ‘Search and Scan’ banner flashing incessantly. It happened in the T20 semis (probably due to some ‘active’ button programming error at TataSky’s end. The damn thing kept flashing every second, over and above the ads and annoyed me to no extent!
l. TataSky logo – a partnership with the channel.
Now, that’s more than 10 things on my screen!
The image is composed with all elements I have noticed on screen, but you get the idea.I am not going to pay to watch that??
