Has Seven finalised its commentary line-up for the Australian Open yet? 2008 Open runner-up and former world No.1 player Ana Ivanovic announced her retirement overnight so she could be available for special comments. Seven will have to fight against the likes of ESPN and Eurosport for her services though.
Sadly They shafted them to 7TWO a few years back even during the day.
The daytime coverage for the Brisbane International will all be shown on Seven with the night session shown on 7two. As for Sydney, all the coverage will be on 7two except for Mondays daytime coverage.
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Will be interesting to see if new graphics will be introduced this year as they were during the first year of the 2012-2016 AFL broadcasting rights.
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Judging by promos and the new logo… possibility is high.
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[quote]Tennis Australia is facing a new crisis amid claims a potential conflict of interest could have influenced the decision to sell the television rights for the Australian Open to Seven West Media in a private deal worth around $200 million.
The decision to sell the 2015-2019 broadcasting rights to Seven West Media before launching a competitive bidding process has never been explained by the sport’s governing body despite speculation it may have lost up to $50 million in potential revenue.[/quote]
More: http://www.smh.com.au/national/tennis-crisis-over-200-million-seven-deal-20161230-gtk1mw.html
I’m curious at whether this is trying to in some way discredit Tennis Australia or Seven
Was widely speculated back then this was off. Stunk of some sort of corruption.
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I’m of that same mindset because that article which littlegezzybear linked to has no (from what I read) substantive information/details about the potential conflict of interest and which board member/s would have such a conflict
It’s odd enough to not go to market to raise questions.
There’s a difference between conflict of interest and corruption (it’s possible to not own shares in a broadcaster but take a backhander; not suggesting any such thing happened).
It may have been that Seven presented a great case for sticking with them and Tennis Australia was happy to do so.
Broadcast rights revenue isn’t everything; sometimes the better coverage a sport would hope to achieve with a particular partner is worth it, plus there is a cost in running a tender process, the evaluation, and how do you structure it? Tender for a single partner or split events?
For example each broadcaster will (want to) have exclusive contracts with commentators (including former high profile foreign players), so such splits could result in some of the events broadcast having better/worse commentary than others, and TA would lose the cohesive ‘summer of tennis’ thing Seven has advertised, which I imagine TA would also like.
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I see Hamish McLachlan returning to Fromt the Brisbane International likewise to Basil Zempilas with the Hopman Cup.
Quite clearly yes.
I think the exposure (and the quality of the coverage) is amazing what tennis gets with Seven and honestly sacrificing a bit of money to keep that is good for the game.
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This is interesting. According to the Sunday Herald Sun, Bruce McAvaney will have a holiday instead of commentating matches at the Australian Open. However he will call the Davis Cup tie between Australia and the Czech Republic the weekend after the Open. Lleyton Hewitt will be calling more matches now he has retired from competitive tennis.
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No ‘HD’ add-on in Canberra (where 7mate is HD).
As I like the Hopman Cup & while it’s on 7mate HD right now, I guess I don’t yet mind the lack of Prime7HD, but it’ll be bad if the main 7 channel everywhere isn’t HD by the time the AusOpen starts.
Here during the coverage it’s already reported a BNE Int’l in-progress score and a few minutes ago (13:52 AEDT) a commentator said viewers could ‘switch to Channel 7’, but the BNE Int’l won’t start on Prime7 Canberra until 14:00 AEDT (if the TV guide’s correct, the same applies for 7HD Sydney).
BTW I’m not liking the new MasterCard logo. It seems like it’s too generic (so couldn’t be trademarked) and they’ve given up on having almost no one spell it correctly (single word but with a capital C). Like most Aus TV logos, I’d ask what was wrong with the previous logo/how is this better? (Or was it change for change’s sake?)
I’m surprised so much appears to have gone to air without the 7 channel logo… or are these caps from the internal/clean feed?
This is from Prime7, who haven’t put a watermark up (yet).
Hopman Cup was without watermark for abit, but then it appeared. Nothing on main channel yet.