The ABC only held the rights in Victoria (and some replay rights elsewhere), TVW7 Perth, SAS 10 Adelaide, TV0 Brisbane and SBS in Sydney held the main rights and used the Broadcom broadcast.
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Seven took VFL in Perth, there was a Seven Sport (SP7RT) advertising sign on the fence at WCE home games. Also Capital 7 (CTC7) had the rights in Canberra region, they only took the Saturday arvo Match of the Day and the finals. ABC in Victoria used their own commentators instead of Broadcom’s (used for the commercial stations interstate).
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Seven Perth also covered WAFL matches on the Saturday Afternoons and had signage at most (I would imagine, if not all) WAFL venues of which Subiaco (home of Subiaco at the time) and the WACA (used for occasional night games and the interstate match vs SA) were.
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Sunday as well
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Thanks… thought it was on Sundays (along with Saturdays)
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Saw this on the Wide World of Sports YouTube channel. Pretty interesting.
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This is one of the few shows I havent seen any footage survive of.
I remember watching it live.
So if anyone has any parts of Sportswatch lying around on VHS, message me
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3.5 hours on both days, at least to start with… basically taking the footy timeslot, plus a half-hour “Final Score” show at 5pm. Still had to fit in the Weekender programs at 5.30, at least on one of the days.
Best I can find is a 15-second promo for it, the date would put it around the time of round 2 of the AFL: Channel Seven Sydney - Promo and Presentation Montage (6.4.2002) - YouTube
As for the clash over the footage rights… I think the compromise that ended up happening was that were told to stop it, but I think they said it was hard to stop them pulling stuff that had appeared on news feeds… to which one of the networks (I think Nine) responded by deliberately reducing the picture/signal quality of those.
Bit of an odd time for Seven’s footy stuff… they also tried footy reality with that show The Club in 2002 [also in Zampakid’s montage above, a little later on], where they built a team (the “Hammerheads”) to play in second-tier western suburbs district footy for a year - and I recall that might’ve bumped Talking Footy to Tuesday as a result. I guess it meant they could use their still-relatively-new studio in BCM, overlooking Docklands, that they couldn’t exactly use for actual footy…
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Great find… some caps from YouTube
As discussed, this would have been one of the first programmes to come out out of BCM in 2002.
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How long did the sports watch show go for?
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The satellite signal loss in West Germany v Uruguay, as handled by TVB Pearl in Hong Kong, World Cup 1986:
Citing from this site:
Here we see a colourful breakdown slide from Pearl, accompanied by actual music, before cutting to Barry Davies explaining the technical feat in transmitting sound in this World Cup.
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Not any longer than 2002, whether it lasted beyond footy season or continued to ratings season’s end I don’t know - certainly they would have lost a couple of Saturdays due to their Melbourne Cup carnival rights so they might not have bothered.
It wasn’t on all the time… there was a three-paragraph quip on The Age’s web site about how they had had a “change of heart” about broadcasting the NSL prelim/grand finals in May as opposed to Sportswatch - after originally telling Soccer Australia that they’d only cover games in Newcastle, instead of Perth or Cronulla [or wherever Sydney Olympic were to play a final].
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I remember it finishing the last week of the AFL season.
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I know they had 2 weeks off in the middle of the year to cover the Commonwealth Games in Manchester. Plus they had 2 Sundays where basically they covered the NSL finals (a Greek Derby prelim between Olympic and South Melbourne played at Marconi and the GF in Perth with Olympic stunning the capacity crowd by beating the Glory 1-0) with ads in the middle of the halves instead of the rolling score service.
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During much of the 1980s, TVNZ used to show rugby highlights from around 5pm on a Saturday as part of the Sport on One programme. But when it came to the All Blacks, their test matches (on my country’s home soil) were televised live at around 2.30pm or 3pm and preceded by a match build-up.
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Sounds about right. Maybe they covered three games because South Melb vs Olympic Sharks at Marconi was the minor semi-final [presumably Shark Park was being used, that was the period Sydney Olympic had their Cronulla NRL tie-up] - Olympic then travelled to Newcastle for the prelim against the Jets - hence the grumble I found about Seven not wanting to cover any remaining games outside of Newcastle for some reason. I did see an article saying they also covered that elimination semi, so.
I might have got the venues mixed up a little as I misread the wiki article about it, apologies. Essentially that would’ve meant not covering games for Perth Glory, and given they were playing it at Subiaco, I wonder whether AFL politics reigned over anything Soccer Australia could do (in the end it sounds like they still came to an agreement to cover it, so all’s well that ends well).
Incidentally, Soccer Australia wouldn’t have needed to do all that scrambling with Seven at all, if not for the imminent closure of C7 Sport on pay - Optus had already dropped it by this point, and Austar replaced it with Fox Footy (mk 1) by early May, signalling its ultimate demise.
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Did not know SBS did their own coverage for A-League games:
However, due to the broadcasting contract rights at the time (Foxtel were allowed to show it live), SBS had to show it on a one-hour delay which for me meant staying off social media for its duration.
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SBS had live Friday nights but Finals and the Grand Final were live on Foxtel and on delay on SBS
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