Rugby Australia are laughing all the way to the bank, from the highly successful Lions tour and the upcoming Rugby World Cup, next year in Australia.
The Melbourne Rebels were bleeding cash and Victoria is an AFL, Cricket and Horse Racing state (even Soccer attendances are low for A-league games), so it was a wise move to get rid of them IMO.
Super Rugby was on Gem for the past 3-4 years, and if the Australian teams are competitive and the Wallabies do well this year, it will probably equate to more bums on seats at the stadiums, boosting the coffers and growing the sport. In other words, one Super Rugby match being on free to air TV on a Saturday evening doesn’t guarantee success.
It seems that the Shute Shield FTA game has been expanded to the whole season rather than just the end of it.
It balances things out a little bit. Maybe not completely as certainly Shute Shield is a much less prestigious competition, but imo the better games in the Shute Shield are more consistently competitive than Super Rugby matches so are probably a better viewing experience for casual viewers who might be captured by FTA.
The white score graphics on the scorebug look very similar in size to those on the international EPL feed. It seems to be a trend - big scores to make it easier to see
Mark Robson is pretty good so is Ryle Nugent on the 6N world feed are good, bit i agree they sometimes ham it up to an Alan Partridge-esque level. Greg Clark who does the Dura games is good too. I’m glad he got a gig after Fox lost the rights.
The last one was based on Sky’s graphics package at that time.
Perhaps, and it’s just a theory, as there’s more interest in Super Rugby in NZ than in Australia, TPTB might be happy to just let the NZ broadcaster set the standard. It’s probably more cost-effective from Rugby’s perspective to let a broadcaster do the heavy lifting on producing a graphics package rather than doing something in-house.
If memory serves, when Seven served as host broadcaster for the 2017 Rugby League World Cup, they licensed a derivative of Sky’s graphics package rather than build their own, so Sky have a bit of a history of letting others use their graphics.
Wide World of Sports presents Women’s Rugby Test with the Wallaroos Vs Fiji, live from Gio Stadium, Canberra. Join our expert commentary team for all the action, analysis and post match interviews. Kick off at 4:55PM AEDT.
Commentator Sean Maloney lost his voice (in fact he never really had it from the top of the broadcast) and withdrew 20 minutes into the Force v Chiefs game last night in Perth. Andrew Swain subbed in to replace him.
