"Hey Danny, these new broadcast guys are asking for a clause that let’s them break every single promise whenever they feel like it and pay us half as much afterwards.
“Sure thing, Ant. Let’s say they can do whatever they want and pay us nothing… if the Aurora Australis happens over Uluru! Hahaha”
“Haha good one Danny.”
smash cut to May 2024
I see a lot of people on Facebook suggesting that Fox was loads better. But seriously, they’re ignoring the last 2 years or so that were absolute rubbish.
Agree with the sentiment that Fox was best when they had both EPL and the A League.
These are the same morans who complain that games aren’t on FTA, despite more games being in FTA now than before.
There problem is and will always be the euro snobs
They will never understand what it is like to support a team
I think Simon Hill is pretty close to on the money to be honest. Ok Paramount is a shit streaming service (albeit I have lived overseas most of the time it has been on their service - hence unaffected as much as the local fans so maybe not as frustrated) but Fox really were assholes with how they got out of their contract. He makes a great point that more answers should be given by the APL on where all the money has gone or is going. 140m gone, 20-30m a year in revenue from sponsors, government and Paramount and the clubs will only get 5m of that a year now? Where is the other 20 or so going? Having the TV production costs would be a big one I suspect, at a guess 5-10m but that is still a lot left over.
I think ALP needs to as much as possible tie themselves to the EPL contract.
While it might cost a few $s they (the Eurosnobs) are the easy converts, they add eyeballs and might start coming to games.
Ideal would be back to Foxtel/Kayo… but who knows with Amazon around (have the T20 WC cricket coming up)
Worst case is something like Stan Sport - an absolute disaster for rugby viewership.
I struggle to see OptusSport lasting, was surprised they managed to renew last time… you only get one hit from new subscribers to offset on customer acquisition cost.
Problem is most of them will already have Optus for their 3am fix watching a team on the other side of the world they have some tenuous connection to.
So where’s the ROI for Optus to pay money to APL just to show more content to existing subscribers?
Euro snobs don’t convert.
Not everyone who watches the IUALM would have Optus, though… we’d bring them new viewers at a time when they surely would have dropped many of the previously free ones. The question is, do they have ambitions to expand enough to invest enough to keep us viable, or are they just looking to snap up rights that nobody else is bidding for at rock bottom prices.
How many new viewers does the a-league bring? If it was a decent number, you’d have everyone falling over themselves to get the rights but that just isn’t the case
As for Stan Sport… I wouldn’t mind to be honest. They got great numbers for the RWC - the local rugby numbers are bad because the Australian teams are shite and no one in this country tunes in when their team is losing.
I can’t tell if they are marginally less shit this year, or the NZ sides are worse.
Sounds exactly like the A League.
Little from column a and a little from column b… either way the standard is way down and the British Lions touring is only going to paper over the cracks of a sport of life support
Yeah. But before the pandemic it was light years better than what we have now. Even in the bad times, sure the finals on ABC were on delay, but at least they were fucking shown on FTA!
Im not saying I necessarily want it back on Fox (I don’t think they want it, do they?), but as a benchmark for where football media has been, they’re clearly the high watermark.
YouTube?
Optus is a really interesting one, as they’re very much only focused on sports. Stan for instance, has the added incentive in that you get a whole bunch of shows and at least the app isn’t shit. Optus does do the coverage really well and remembering from when I used to get it for free, they were spot on in the UI they provided. Replays were on almost instantly, you could hide scores and they had live replay WITH an option to hide scores. It really was a well made up (if you ignore the World Cup fiasco).
There’s Amazon as a potential option as well. They’re already doing a whole bunch of live sports and their TV offerings are pretty decent. Essential, what the regular punter needs is that final push to sign up to a streaming service. There’s so many options and i’m sure most of the population has looked at each service available and decided that it’s worth the payment. You just need to have that extra added incentive to push them over the line. I’ve just gotten Prime, after cancelling Paramount because of Fallout, but if it JUST had Fallout, I wouldn’t care, it has a whole bunch of other decent shows so it sealed the deal.
In all though, it’s a moot point as we’re bandying different options as though it’s our decision. The teams in each service need to see the positive they’ll get from hosting the A-League. What would have been good, is if we were up to renegotiate right after the Women’s World Cup. It could have given the League a pretty strong position at the time.
Yes but then Fox decided it wasn’t worth the financial investment, they went downhill in coverage, fired half their staff and let it go. Paramount took over and the production is crap as well. Maybe the benchmark was too high or financially unattainable,
The benchmark was set by a new contract immediately post ADP. We’ll basically never get another ADP level sugar hit, because of what was happening with the Aussie dollar at the time in the post-2009 recession world, and because the Saudis are now in the market for superstar honeymoons along with the MLS and China. At the time, none of that was certain.
Try and sell it to Netflix, everyone has access to a Netflix account (usually not one they’re paying for). They’ve just signalled their intent to acquire new types of content by striking a deal with the WWE, maybe they’d be willing to do more live sport?
Plus it would probably count towards their Australian content that they need to produce as part of the quota rules that have been talked about for the last 18 months.
