Behind the live telecast

For a cricket crazy nation it is just a matter of pressing a button on television remote to join the game. But a huge manpower and technical expertise are required behind the telecasting of cricket matches live from every venue to make it a worldwide fever.

Star Sports is the only cricketcaster which airs separate Hindi and English presentations. India has some 54.52 million DTH subscribes, 70% of them live in rural and small town India and this knowledge has inspired sportscaster Star Sports to air separate and quality Hindi presentation.

A team of around 200-250 people, most of them free lancers, works behind the scenes in making the footage available to the cricket fans across the globe. Instead of tendering production, BCCI has an in-house television production unit and the BCCI Broadcasting unit not only does the production for international home series, but also for the Indian Premier League (IPL) and Champions League T20.

Star Sports has separate 

Hindi and English presentations

BCCI employs a team of around 70 people with 30 high definition cameras, both manned and unmanned while the official broadcasters of India cricket Star Sports engages around 150 people, ferries 40 tones of equipment and lay around 20 km cable for making the live telecast possible. And separate Hindi and English presentations require two control rooms and two studios one each for Hindi and English broadcast. Star Sports often does pre & post match shows, not from the studios but from the venue.

BCCI team has both technical & non-technical staff from the country and abroad to ensure high quality feed to be beamed all over the world. Star Sports has the BCCI telecast rights so BCCI provides them their production output which they further sell to other broadcasters. The channel seeks feed from BCCI control room for its English channel and airs it in the format it receives.This is called the world-feed. 

As BCCI gives English only feed, for Hindi channel feed Star Sports has to reproduce this world feed to make sure that the pictures which are being aired are in tune with the Hindi commentary. To do so Star Sports deploys some cameras to beam pictures and reproduces the feed with Hindi graphics in its Hindi production control room before airing.

For domestic matches, they ferry most of the equipment procured from some vendor in bigger cities but for international matches they have to ferry some of the equipment and procure most of them locally, manpower, most of them are freelancers, is hired locally before the scheduled date of the match.

Source : Special team for 'glocal' screening from ToI.