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As the West Indies cricketers prepare to leave for their tour of New Zealand, the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) is sounding another alarm about spiralling costs of providing television coverage of overseas tours.

The situation was so serious, warned CBU secretary-general Patrick Cozier, that it was a real possibility that the CBU would have to consider curtailing broadcasts of overseas West Indies tours unless a solution was found.

That is always an unfortunate possibility, but we are trying not to focus on the downside, he said in New York.

We are trying to focus on the upside by saying, We have to keep cricket going. As a consequence we are trying to come up with creative ways of approaching it.

Although the CBU is going ahead with plans to cover the games in New Zealand, it may end up losing a large sum of money on the telecasts throughout the region.

Cozier said the CBU didnt have the kind of support from the various television stations to make the project financially feasible.

Our overseas tours are becoming very very touchy, he said. Right now, we have acquired the rights for the New Zealand tour (but) right now we do not even have the support from the stations to be able even to pay for those rights.

The stations are having problems affording it. As of todays date we dont have enough commitments from stations to even cover the basic costs.

However, he was quick to point out that the financial problem he was talking about wouldnt affect coverage of Test matches in the Caribbean.

For the domestic tours, we have an arrangement with the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) who are the rights holders for the domestic or home tours, he said.

For the overseas tours, we have to buy the (broadcast) rights from international rights holders who either hold or have bought rights globally for regions of the world, which include the Caribbean. They obviously dont have the same commitment to West Indies cricket as the WICB.

Such organisations and companies, he added, view the tours as an opportunity for economic exploitation

© The Barbados Nation