Industry speculation is that [Nine will spend just over $300m to wrest the rights from Optus for the next three years starting with the upcoming 2025/26 season.
In recent years, Optus Sport has moved away from its earlier ambitions to be a live sports streaming powerhouse, opting not to renew broadcast rights for major football competitions such as La Liga and the UEFA Champions League in keeping with a revised strategy to prioritise core telecommunications business.
This week’s anticipated EPL deal is part of an overall push within Nine to increase the slate of live sports on its streaming platform, although it’s understood the pursuit of the EPL contract has been the source of tension at board level.
This is the puzzling thing. The AFR reported at the start of the year that Nine didn’t place a bid during that process because of how much they would have had to pay to secure the EPL rights. Yet Nine are reportedly about to do just that…
Either there’s some way they can now make the economics work or this is perhaps a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ attempt to save Stan Sport.
One thing seemingly not discussed is distribution in venues (pubs, clubs etc).
Optus Sport is fairly widely distributed. Stan has very limited penetration in that market. EPL rights could change that and help to recoup some of the rights costs.
Stan Sport’s big problem in my view is that it is hideously expensive for what you get. If you’re a big fan of Tennis or Rugby Union it’s probably worthwhile but otherwise you don’t get a lot of bang for your buck. Adding more sports to their collection starts to make the value proposition better.
With AFL, NRL and home Cricket all locked in for another few years at least they really need to be looking at making a strong bid at the next tier of sports that have a strong following and can drive new subscriptions.
The Premier League is one of them. You just need to look at how many people subscribe to Optus Sport just for that alone.
The other sport (that I know is a big target for Stan) that would also bring in new subscriptions is Formula 1, particularly with Oscar’s success of late.
It will be interesting to see how much money Nine has to throw at getting sport for Stan - if the EPL is indeed heading their way, that’s a lot of money for something that its widely accepted is unlikely to break even.
It’s a lot of money, but surprisingly, on a per-game basis, I don’t think anything would rival it given what it delivers (both in terms of games and yearly spread).
Stan’s spree on the EPL rights also contradicts Nine’s announcements on Friday on its executive restructure, and a review into the sporting rights it currently has.
Add to that the NRL rights. They’ve said they want the entire suite of rights so they’ll need billions to get that. V’landys will be aiming for 700m+ per season as a minimum. Would nine have the 3.5b over 5 years or 7b over 10 years to go for NRL?
Will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Surely a 10-year offer is more than simply being double a 5-year offer too - the NRL aren’t going to want their rights value to be static (or go backwards)
Probably not, was just a hypothetical. If they want the entire rights they’ll need billions. Just not sure how they do it with all these other rights they’ve been buying up. Their subscription projections must be very high.
I’d like to see the early Saturday game on 9Go or 9Gem in HD.
Nine could do it for the first season to dangle a carrot to boost subscribers to Stan Sport.
In any case, most, if not all of the existing Optus Sport subscribers who are EPL fans and have not yet got a Stan Sport subscription, would most likely come across , boosting Stan’s overall Active subscription numbers past the 3 million mark.
Having a free to air presence on 9Gem or 9Go would bring the EPL to a new audience and could help to boost Stan subscribers even more.
Surely there would be discussions here regarding getting Stan Sports onto the existing satellite and STBs venues already have for Optus Sport? Maybe bundling the two? Makes the most sense for both sides where venues are more likely to keep Optus and Stan doesn’t start from zero.
As much as I’m a tennis fan, that’s not really a needle mover. Only the slams are, those rights came up last year and didn’t chase them. Fair enough, as long as the slams are covered well, I’m happy.
This goes against Stan’s strategy with sport of not paying overs for rights. Have to echo the thoughts here, this is a last ditch effort for them to get Stan Sport to work. Given that grand slam tennis has the best possible coverage I could ask for then I have to hope this works.
and they did a crap job with it. races were on tape delay, they would run a newsbreak during the races giving the result, they even at times played races out of order - one time we came back to the race after an advert and got the same segment we just watched. went to another advert and came back to where we should have been, skipping the missed part. Quali was a 60 second highlighhts pack and practice was not aired at all.
if 9 get it i hope they take the F1 TV coverage and move away from the sky coverage
