1xBet branding surfaces in Indian cricket broadcasts despite offshore gambling ad ban

The series in question ran July 23-26 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where 1xBet was the tournament’s official sponsor. That got its branding onto press walls, video screens, and ad boards around the stadium — standard venue sponsorship, except the venue’s own broadcast signal gets exported internationally, and Indian viewers picked it up through FanCode and the Zee Entertainment network. FanCode then republished match clips carrying the same branding to its own social accounts afterward.

Asked about it, a platform representative gave Entrackr a straightforward answer: the feed arrives already finished, built by the tournament’s own production, and there’s no editorial control over what the venue’s sponsors put on the boards before the cameras start rolling. The venue-sponsorship deal itself is the actual mechanism worth understanding here: those agreements get signed on the other side of the planet, months before any Indian platform sees a frame of footage, which locks the branding in long before anyone downstream has a chance to object.

Two policy layers are technically supposed to prevent exactly this. India’s information and broadcasting ministry has spent since 2022 warning streaming services, digital platforms, and TV channels away from offshore gambling ads — guidance that hardened into actual law this past May, when rules under the Online Gaming Regulation Act banned both direct and indirect promotion outright.

None of this is new territory for 1xBet specifically. The same branding showed up earlier this year on Sony LIV and Sony Sports Network during India A’s tour of Sri Lanka — a near carbon copy of what just happened in Zimbabwe, down to the broadcaster’s likely explanation. Entrackr has since put the question to the people who could actually answer it: the BCCI, the ministry, and the broadcasters themselves, asking whether anyone carrying an international feed into India is obligated to strip out branding the country has already outlawed.