In the tenth year of providing premium cricket content, Dish Network, under Kelly's captaincy is adding value to the World Cup package this season by offering an exciting array of highly interactive tools.

In a telephonic interview with Srirekha N. Chakravarty, Kelly talked about Dish Network's unique value proposition, the high cost of cricket licensing, cricket in the US, and his own passion for the gentleman's game.

Kelly: Our package allows the subscribers to record the matches on DVR and watch them at leisure. The second tool is the pocket dish - a portable personal video recorder, which connects to the computer hard drive allowing you to download entire matches onto this device from a DVR in 5-6 minutes, and then watch it wherever you are on the train, plane, bus or anywhere.

The third feature is the interactive TV, which allows the viewer to interact with the match as it is going on through the interactive application. One can go back and forth between two different events, or go to menu and get information on players, history, statistics etc.

This is something not being made available by the host broadcaster or the ultimate rights holder. It's something that Dish is doing as we continue to build on value proposition for our customers.

Kelly: With our focus on core South Asian programming channels, we have been fortunate to grow the customer base, which has in turn resulted in more customers buying cricket programming from us. This has actually allowed us to reduce the pricing point in the market place, while absorbing the exorbitant and incredibly high cost of license fees.

In 1996, the total rights for the World Cup cricket sold for $14 million dollars to each country. In 2007-2008, the ICC package sold for $1.2 billion. So we are facing significant rise in cost of content, but we have been able to drive the price point down here in the US to our viewers while enhancing the package at the same time.

Kelly: We will continue to experience more and more downward pressure on the pricing as our customers grow. Hopefully as they grow, we will be able to bring in advertising sales as a way to offset subscription cost. But this is something that will evolve over time. We have been successful so far, but it needs to be seen if we can continue to sustain that.

We have taken a lot of risk not only in the World Cup but also in acquiring the rights from BCCI through 2010, and paid an enormous amount of money for that property as well. We are gambling on the possibility that we will be able to grow the customer base.

Kelly: The fact that license fees continues to sky rocket, I am not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, nor if it's a sustainable growth curve. I am only hopeful that a lot of the money generated in the next seven years will trickle down into the county and club level cricket and support the sport and allow it to grow over time. But, if this money is simply distributed in the top level and doesn't find its way to actually supporting the sport, ultimately it will fail. I don't think the cricket products will be competitive against other sports that continue to evolve through the technological and informational revolution.

Kelly: The US has now become the second largest television market for cricket -- larger than Australia, South Africa and England. And that's encouraging.

I don't think cricket will ever be as popular as football. But the landscape of sports is changing. It's not going to be dominated by two or three American sports anymore. Look at how popular NASCAR has become in the last 10 years. Their ratings are as high as NBA basketball games. Tony Hawk, the skateboarder, is as popular as Michael Jordan was in his sport. You see the diversity of interest in people, particularly among kids.

That's why I feel it's important to promote cricket at club/ county level. It may not be as popular as football but we can see that it becomes a popular sustainable sport in the US.

Kelly: When we started South Asian content, I started off with feature films for only a couple of hours by satellite and actually found that there was a pretty strong appetite for that. Soon thereafter I became owner of TV Asia, partnering with (Bollywood legend) Amitabh Bachchan. (TV Asia is currently owned by HR Shah). That's how my association with the South Asian community grew, and I started to go out and licensing cricket content from companies like World Tel back in the early '90s, importing content from Sharjah and distributing it initially to theaters, universities and campuses, and eventually onto home dish. That's the short story.

Kelly: I have a bat hanging in my office signed by top champions in cricket -- Vivian Richards, Richard Hadlee, Barry Richards, Doug Walters, Garfield Sobers, Sachin Tendulkar -- it's a great talking point.

Cricket is a lot like baseball, not only in physical attributes but also in mental attributes - there's a tremendous amount of psychology, strategy and math involved, which makes it exciting for me.

When we ran our first pay-per-view cricket on Dish Network, we had only 66 buyers and we made $360 in revenue after spending nearly $50,000 in license fee. But I had the faith and today cricket is the mainstay product of Dish Network and it has become a part of the culture in the company.