1.18b Foxtel/Seven over 6 years vs 960m from Ten over 5 years.
CA would’ve taken 1b over 5 years from Ten. They should’ve offered that from day 1 and shut out Foxtel completely.
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Sorry but the deal fox did is dodgy and corrupt and will cost them money as the game withers and dies. There’s a premium for free to air.
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Just wondering, was CA trying to get Fox involved because they desperately wanted the money to compensate their losses from advertisers after ball tampering saga?
I havr a feeling that if ball tampering never happened then Ten would be getting the cricket this year as opposed to Fox.
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And Foxtel didn’t want 10 as a partner after they were bought by CBS. Why are people still moaning about 10 not paying enough? 7 and Murdoch ensured 10 was shut out of a deal with CA. It’s all so straight forward, who is 7 collaborating with now and into the future? News Ltd.
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Even without Foxtel trying to make a mockery of the anti-siphoning laws, the networks still need to think about a future without major sporting coverage regardless because there’ll likely be a point in the medium-long term future where Cricket Australia along with the AFL, NRL and other major sporting bodies decide they can bypass Seven/Nine/Ten and provide their content directly to consumers (albeit with a subscription fee) via online streaming services.
That sounds plausible, but along with $1 Billion I still wouldn’t be overly surprised if the offer of a dedicated cricket channel was something which sold Cricket Australia over to Foxtel.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Cricket Australia needs a dedicated channel for their sport to thrive/survive (Foxtel obviously do because they need something to keep subscribers hooked up all year round rather than just during the football season/s) but at the same time, it wouldn’t have been overly surprising if CA have been monitoring the success (but at the detriment of FTA coverage) of Fox Footy/League in recent years thinking “we want something like that”!
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Probably why the networks are paying so over the top for sports rights now. Once the hyper inflation of sports rights ends, we might see some of the sports make the move to their own streaming with networks/Pay only getting basic content?
Because if 10 paid a bit more, we could be in a situation now where they have exclusive rights to all cricket. Foxtel having the rights wasn’t as inevitable as some believe/suggest it was:
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So Ten’s offer was effectively $1.152 billion over 6 years - if they “were prepared to take a significant discount for everything to be on FTA” - surely that is not ‘too great’ of a ‘discount’?
It looks they extended it to a 6 year deal just so they could reach the billion dollar mark - because the ‘$983m 5 year deal’ would have shown itself as clearly so marginally more than Ten’s offer to make that statement a clear lie.
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The one thing that I will say about the “bottom feeder” comment is at least James Sutherland left shortly after this deal and before the report of the ball tampering scandal was issued as opposed to David Peever who was elected Chairman only the week before.
In addition Mark Taylor quit a short time later… So if Ten were bottom feeders, what would you call Peever and Taylor?
Sky TV NZ is taking the Seven (host broadcaster?) commentary and graphics feed for the Big Bash tonight. Previously been taking Fox for the tests.
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And weirdly, Sky NZ is tonight showing the Fox coverage.
Will be interesting to see if they now stick with Fox OR whether Fox and Seven are splitting host broadcast duties (was this ever clarified?) and Sky will take whichever network is producing
Doubt it’s the latter - if Seven & Fox we’re splitting the host broadcaster duties for the BBL, the latter would be showing more than just their 16 exclusive matches in 4K
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Why is the watermark on Foxtel 4K “FOX LIVE BETA”?
Are they showing tonight’s game in 4K, even though its produced by Seven? Maybe they’re beta testing upscaling?
Ah, good point.
Sky has taken Fox coverage apart from game 1, but obviously can’t for tonight as 7 is producing the feed.
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Thankfully, that hasn’t happened (in full), with 10 lapping up good primetime shares with the alternate strategy called I’m a Celebrity against BBL and Tennis.
Fox, Nine and 10 must be laughing their heads off right now while Seven struggles in the deep.
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Personally I think we should reserve our full judgement on the Summer of Sport ratings for a couple of weeks. But with Fox Cricket and the Australian cricket team generally performing absolutely appallingly in recent times, it wouldn’t overly surprise me if Seven loses money on their coverage.
Fixed it for you, Fox still haven’t got great numbers for the exclusive games. 
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Considering Nine did even with exclusive games, Seven will too.
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