Cricket's emergence as a prime driver of entertainment television in India is a relatively new phenomenon. Until 2002, at the time when Set Max first made its mark with the telecast of the ICC Champions Trophy played in Colombo, cricket was hardly ever covered by non-news and non-sports channels in India. Till then cricket was not entertainment; it was sport, which was profoundly different and had a distinctive sphere of its own. Then came what can justifiably be termed the Sony revolution. Just like most things novel, the attempt to promote cricket with Ruby Bhatia as anchor in September 2002 was a failure. 

Unlike most novel Indian experiments, however, the plan was persisted with. And the biggest surprise of World Cup 2003, an even bigger surprise perhaps than India's qualification for the final, was the run away success of the Mandira Bedi phenomenon. The success was such that during the world cup Max showed a 24% growth while rivals like Star lost out on 47% of its viewers. Said Kunal Dasgupta, CEO, Set India, "The Tam ratings for the week ending 15th February reveal that Max was the top channel and garnered the highest channel share amongst all C&S channels." Statistics showed that for the first time in its history in the week ending 15 February 2003 Max was the top channel with a channel share of 16.8% as against 11.1% of the second placed Star Plus.

What added spice to the Max success was that it had returned excellent ratings across all markets and cities. While Calcutta returned a high average rating of 10.3 for all the seven world cup matches played that week, the ratings skyrocketed to a spectacular 20.2 during the India-Australia game. Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai all achieved a near 10 rating making the week immensely successful for Max. 

As reported by the Max press release issued on 24 February 2003, "The cricket telecast on Max attracted a whopping 48.6 million C&S individuals across the TAM markets. Further even before India played its first match, Max had already attracted 38.4 million viewers, vindicating the appeal of its cricket presentation to every kind of cricket lover in India, including the die hard purists." 

Extraaa-Innings, Max's pre, mid and post match wrap around programming, on its own managed to bring in an unprecedented 25.1 million individuals even before India played its first match. This further shot up to 36.9 million individuals by the end of Week one of the tournament. 

Interestingly, the cricket coverage also impacted the channel's overall performance. During the world cup twenty of the top hundred programs of the month were from Max. There were four Max programs in the top 20, 12 in the top 50 and 20 in the top 100.

 The success of Max's cricket coverage also made possible other major business tie-ups for the channel. As reported by Business Line, the financial daily of the Hindu, Aajtak and Sony entered into a tie up on the eve of the Videocon Super Challenge in Amsterdam in August 2004. According to the tie-up Max was to provide Aaj-Tak access to its commentators and other panelists for its half-hour cricket capsule, Runbhoomi. Tushar Shah, Vice-President, Max justified this tie-up suggesting, "This marks a new era in marketing in the television domain. Max is known for innovation, creativity and attitude, and this tie-up is an example of all three coming together to create a win-win situation for both Aaj Tak and Max."

 Many ask whether this unique blending of entertainment with sport dilutes the essence of cricket. In other words, whether such a blending, which for some is an anathema for the cricket purist, can ever take the game forward. Such questions, I wish to suggest, are missing the point completely. As Amartya Sen had mentioned in an interview soon after winning the Nobel Prize, it is not relevant whether one likes globalisation or not, it is the defining feature of our age and we have to live with it. It is only pertinent how far we are able to tame it to suit our needs. Similarly, after the success of the Set Max brand of cricket coverage, the important question is no longer whether this form of coverage is proper. 

Rather, the question is, or should be, how the nature of coverage can be made more interactive — thus widening the ambit of cricket spectatorship. One simple statistic is enough to substantiate the above point. In 2003, most cricket magazines and portals had rallied against the "invasion of the dumb belles" but by the end of the World Cup, Sony's managers themselves were surprised by the ratings: 2.2 crore women had tuned in and amounted to a massive 46% of the total viewership. Set Max had successfully become the "voice of the cricket-widows". At the same time the die-hard cricket purist had not condemned the Max brand of coverage. As Rajat Jain, a senior Max official had suggested, "A purist is someone who will watch cricket regardless of whether or not India is playing. And remember even before India had played its first match Extraa Innings had reached put to 25.1 million individuals. We believe that a majority of them were purists." 

As far as TV advertising was concerned, media buyers suggested on the eve of the cup that Sony had already managed advertising worth Rs. 2.1 billion and Nimbus, which was commissioned to produce the Extraa-Innings programme had garnered 1.3 billion. In fact, a relatively unimportant match like the India-Zimbabwe encounter attracted 4760 seconds of advertising. According to the findings of a TAM-S group, Max had the opportunity to telecast approximately 250 commercials in these 4760 seconds. 

Another interesting Sony innovation was the unique blending of Bollywood with cricket. Given that cricket and Bollywood have been crucial in fashioning people's identification with a consumerist ethos within a liberalizing society and economy, this was a masterstroke. Sony used its feature film Lagaan effectively to build its mass base on the eve of the world cup. The Sony-Lagaan contest, held during the screening of the film, was promoted with the interesting catch line, "Watch India vs England on January 26; watch India vs England on February 26!". The contest invited viewers to SMS the answer to a simple question from their mobile phones to the designated Sony number or to log on to its website. 

As reported by Indiantelevision.com "the contest promised to take 11 lucky winners to South Africa and enable them to watch the World Cup cricket 2003 league match involving the Indians and the English players. Consider the following statistics: a total of 68,000 messages were received during the five hour period (starting 1 pm) when the movie was screened. There were 29,075 correct answers which only showed that viewers-purists and masses-were participating in a big way." 

That Sony was planning this experiment for a long time was already evident in June 2002 when Sony CEO Kunal Dasgupta justified the company's $255 million spending on telecast rights for ICC run tournaments. Dasgupta went on to state, "First and foremost, we want to take the game beyond the male and offer it as family entertainment. The programming initiatives that we are working on will take cricket beyond the boundary and get the families in. There will certainly be a focus on women in our plans. Secondly, we have to generate interest beyond the matches India is playing. And we will have to create devices that provide for that."

One possible way of achieving his desired goal, he declared, was by making the cricketers more media savvy. "They will need to be groomed accordingly so as to give the proper sound bytes at the proper time. Tiger Woods is not just a sporting success story but a marketing one as well and this has been achieved by a great deal of coaching on how he conducts himself." 

Perhaps the best bed fellow, which goes hand in hand with the revolutionary Sony brand of cricket coverage, is cricket's newest avatar, Twenty20 cricket. The similarities are indeed palpable—both have raised the eyebrows of the purists; both have proved to be runaway successes and both, to go a step further, seem defining aspects of the game's future.

In April 2003 the Daily Telegraph, London, had published a poignant picture the day after the start of the English domestic cricket season. A six-column, almost half-page picture, it showed a solitary spectator watching county cricket in an otherwise empty stand. The bottomline was clear. English cricket needed new infusion of oxygen to survive with the very existence of county cricket in peril. This oxygen was first supplied on June 13, 2003 at the Rose Bowl in Hampshire when Sussex Sharks played Hampshire Hawks.

Nearly 15,000 people enjoyed the action and a new phenomenon in Twenty20 cricket was born. Present at the Rose Bowl on that fateful day, I was amazed to see the high percentage of children who had come along with their parents to enjoy the action. Not many, I must confess, watched cricket. However, they did have a good time. With games, toys and a concert to follow it was a perfect summer evening out for the family. Having just watched a few baseball games at Wrigley Field in Chicago, home of the Chicago Cubs, it all seemed familiar—the music, short duration, loud drawling announcements, a little break between innings, two-word alliterating names, frenzied action and, above all, non-stop fun.

Anathema for the cricket purist, it was, simply put, the 'baseballisation' of cricket. If asked to describe the origins of Twenty20 cricket in a single sentence, the best answer would be: It was a survival mechanism. The unique blending of cricket and entertainment achieved by Set Max in the Indian context is yet another survival mechanism. 

Most cricket fanatics, leave alone the occasional ones, are saturated by the amount of one day cricket being played. In such a situation it is almost imperative for television broadcasters to introduce new innovations, newer techniques of coverage that will continue to attract eye-balls to the nation's most perceptible passion. More than making profits, Set Max, it may be suggested, is also entrusted with the duty to ensure that Indians don't get bored with one day cricket. And women anchors, noodle straps, tarot cards, models amidst the fans are all such innovations, which have successfully made cricket coverage more viewer friendly and more interactive.

That this is the way forward for the future was reiterated by L V Krishnan, CEO of Tam India. Commenting on Entertainment Channel programming, he stated, "There are two learnings that come out of 2003. One is that innovative content, well pre-tested before launch, can work wonders…This is what Max brought in and even ESPN-Star Sports executed it very slickly. Look at the Shaz & Waz show. Although the matches (were) being played in Australia, they (were) are creating interactivity through mobile…the genres are not going to change dramatically, it is just the way the content is presented that is going to change."

Finally, it may also be suggested that satellite television in contemporary India is a dynamic realm and these innovations are routine attempts by the industry to remain plugged in. Knowing full well that the Champions Trophy is going to be a high viewership activity, Set Max will surely aim to take cricket coverage yet another step forward and create an entertainment agenda based on cricket. And if the agenda is smeared with patriotism, it is a sure recipe for success. For even Kofi Annan has acknowledged that it is difficult not to get nationalistic over sport. Commenting on the soccer world cup, the UN Secretary General declared, "Which brings me to what is perhaps most enviable of all for us in the UN: the World Cup is an event in which we see goals being reached. I'm not talking only about the goals a country scores; I also mean the most important goal of all—being there, part of the family of nations and peoples, celebrating our common humanity. I'll try to remember that today as Ghana play Italy in Hanover. Of course, I can't promise I'll succeed."

In the contemporary sporting world, few would doubt that India is the new cricketing superpower. It is more often than not that Indians lead, the others follow. Without exaggeration, Indian cricket is a mirror in which nations, communities, men and women now see themselves. That reflection is sometimes bright, sometimes dark, sometimes distorted, sometimes magnified. Cricket, a unique metaphorical mirror, is a source of mass exhilaration and depression, security and insecurity, pride and humiliation, bonding and alienation. In fact, for many in India, cricket has replaced religion as a source of emotional catharsis and spiritual passion, and, since it is among the earliest of memorable childhood experiences, it infiltrates memory, shapes enthusiasms, serves fantasies. It may well be that the revolutionary Sony coverage is yet another fantasy, which has the power to enamour and also infuriate.

We have already seen that the success of Sony's entertainment focused cricket programming has led other Indian news and even sports channels to replicate the same model. In fact, the strategy—special programming with women anchors and other innovative attractions have become the standard way of covering cricket in India. With cricket across the world in need for infusion of new innovations, it is only a matter of time before it becomes the global norm.