Basically what Radiohead said about the commentators, but also the fact that Nine delayed the coverage of regular season games for many years.
So yeah, I’d really like to see free to air TV coverage of the NRL split between Seven and Ten for at least 5-6 years.
Yeah…the addition of relatively recently retired players to Nine’s commentary team such as Thurston & Smith has probably been too little, too late.
Quite an interesting contrast between those two. While retiring at the end of the season, I think Sterlo is still relatively well respected by rugby league fans.
By contrast, Ray Warren has lost it. He probably would’ve retained a reasonably strong legacy with a retirement sometime around 10-15 years ago, but increasing mistakes and irrelevant commentary during match calls are turning Rabs into the Bob Rogers of Australian sports broadcasting. If you heard how bad BR was on 2CH during his final few years before retirement, you’ll get why I’d compare him to Rabs!
Yes, though neither Ray Warren or Peter Sterling are in the Richie Benaud class - I could have never imagined Nine moving him on from his role when he was around, even though Nine’s cricket commentary team was just as guilty of the “old boys” club syndrome.
This is a fair point. Those kind of shows are big with fantasy players and the like. A Teams show could work well late afternoon on a Tuesday on Fox Sports.
I would have thought a second Brisbane team would be largely pushed to get Nine/Fox what they want - more matches involving teams in their second biggest market.
Another week another Rothfield article bagging 9. Whilst I don’t really like much of 9s coverage I think News Corp are running a campaign against them as the free to air partner. Always an agenda with News. They’d want seven involved rather than 9 or 10.
The seven and fox Union of late with a number of things should ring alarm bells for the Australian public!! It would be a disaster for media diversity in this country.
Yeah, no - wishful thinking Sneesby. Nine times out of ten, a sports league/competition will go with the network/s that offer the most cash. In those rare cases where they don’t, there’s often a reason behind snubbing a higher bid (eg; Rugby Australia going with Nine due to the FTA coverage they can provide).
Kayo Freebies satisfies the federal government’s anti–siphoning legislation, which was designed to guarantee Australians receive premium sporting content free, because streaming did not begin until after these laws were enacted in 1992.
Interesting - I wonder what the limits on this would be (like could you acquire the ‘free’ rights and make it difficult to access but free stream to meet the requirements of the broadcasting act)?
The article seems to draw an implication that because they are using Kayo Freebies for Netball, anti-siphoning is dead?
Which for one, it’s irrelevant - the Kayo/Fox deal around netball doesn’t to my knowledge cover the only bit of netball on the anti-siphoning list, the semi-final and final of the Netball World Cup, and only if Australia is involved. I would assume that Netball Australia can only sell, and only did sell, the rights to Diamonds games and Super Netball.
While anti-siphoning is very weak now, I don’t think a reasonable reading of the legislation would mean Kayo Freebies meets it -
BSA 115 (1) - “The Minister may give notice, by legislative instrument, specifying an event, or events of a kind, the televising of which should, in the opinion of the Minister, be available free to the general public.”
Televise is only directly defined in the Anti-Hoarding portion of the BSA, however I would expect that a court would read the use of the word ‘televise’ in one section, as having a consistent definition, which talks about commercial or national broadcasters.
The comminications department website puts it more plainly, https://www.communications.gov.au/policy/policy-listing/anti-siphoning - “The scheme stops pay television broadcasters from buying the rights to events on the anti-siphoning list before free-to-air broadcasters have the opportunity to purchase the rights.”
