TWI, which made a joint bid with Stracon India, was awarded the contract covering the three tests and five one-dayers after their huge offer of $9,90,000 for production and $800,000 for marketing abroad was accepted by Doordarshan.

"The global marketing and production has been awarded to Stracon, who has tied up with TWI. The highest bidder for air-time marketing within the country was Nimbus, who bid Rs 12.01 crore," a top Doordarshan source said.

Doordarshan, which had bagged the rights to telecast Indian cricket in a whopping five-year contract worth Rs 228.48 crore last week, has awarded the rights only for the Kiwi tour and will soon seek bids for the remaining four-and-a-half-year period, for production, domestic and global marketing soon, the source added.

There were four bidders for the production rights -- TWI, the US-based WorldTel, Hong Kong-based Asia Sport and London-based CSI -- and DD put its seal of approval on Monday night after scrutiny and discussion of the bid with the parties concerned, lasting several hours.

The decision finally comes to end concern that the award of production rights ran too close to the first test starting in Mohali on October 10.

Peter Hutton, TWI's head of production in Asia, told PTI on Monday night that his company bagged the rights after a close race with South Africa's Asia Sport.

He was confident that TWI would be able to bring all needed equipment in place well ahead of the test to meet the deadline of October 8. "We have most of the equipment here and most of the personnel also are from India. This will do away with the time needed in clearing equipment if they are brought from abroad," Hutton said.

"We need to do a good job to ensure a long-term relationship with Doordarshan. We were the highest bidders and we are confident of our marketing abilities as we have sales in 44 countries," he said.

The bidding process began after Alpha Sport, who produced the Sri Lanka and Singapore one-day tournaments recently, and Zee TV reportedly going out of the race in the initial stage.

The International Management Group (IMG)-owned TWI and Asia Sport were the two companies left in the final bid process. Asia Sport reportedly quoted $9,90,000 for production and $5,90,000 for overseas marketing while TWI bid $1.2 million and $800,000 respectively, Hutton said.

"We finally offered production for the same figure as Asia Sport," he said adding that TWI was also able to come up with a better offer a favourable deal to DD on payment of tax.