• Which didn't quite go right.

Oh, it went very well. Extremely well, in fact. We had an agreement that they could buy us out after 10 years. We worked with them for 10 years and they bought us out for 250 times of what we invested.

• So it worked well in valuation terms.

And in terms of the product too, actually. We made a lot of money. In that regard, it worked extremely well. It also gave me the foresight to understand all about marketing and licensing, it gave me a lot of insight into the field of sports, and into the licensing of other merchandise.

• So when did you think cricket was something that was so monetisable?

When we talked to ESPN, we looked at all genres of entertainment, and we found that sports is the only genre that people are actually ready to pay for. A movie, they can watch tomorrow, they can watch it day after tomorrow, they can watch it on DVD, they can watch it in the cinema hall. But sports, it is live and you're addicted to it. That's something people want to watch right there and then. They don't want to know the score tomorrow, they don't want to know it from someone else. So we said, if we went and bought all the cricket rights in the world -- at that time cricket rights weren't being sold by any of the boards; in fact boards were going to platforms like Doordarshan and begging them to put it on air -- then people are going to be wanting to pay. But you need to have a system to collect the money and that's when our joint alliance with ESPN came in. We became their arm to make sure we set up a system.

... contd.