What if the Matildas’ World Cup run had taken place on Foxtel, or Optus Sport, or Amazon? As sport, its merit would remain unchanged but as culture, it would have become something else entirely.
Word would have spread, news outlets would have swooned, subscriptions would have spiked, but the fervour would have been dulled. Sure, pubs and live sites would have picked up some of the slack, but there never could have been the sense we all had that everyone was watching. Together.
The Women’s World Cup would have had a hugely different community feel if it hadn’t been available on free-to-air TV.Credit: Getty
This is the best reason we have anti-siphoning laws in this country. They were introduced in the ’90s at the onset of pay-television to ensure sporting events of national significance remained on free-to-air television, accessible to all. Thus, the Olympics, the AFL and NRL finals series, the Ashes, and the Australian Open tennis (among other things) are preserved for free public consumption. That was a simple enough equation when pay-TV was the only real competitor. But now we’re in a world swamped by streaming, the equation has become ever more complicated.
That’s why the Albanese government this week proposed new legislation to update this regime. Among the headlines is that it wanted to add more sports to the anti-siphoning list, especially women’s and para sports. In the weeds is a proposal to force TV manufacturers to give prominence to free-to-air streaming apps (7+, 9Now, 10Play, iview) over the subscription competitors. And to the fore is a clear clashing of interests: of the free-to-air broadcasters, of subscription services and tech companies, of the sporting bodies selling their rights, and of consumers. And as you’d expect, everyone argues their case by pretending they’re really acting in someone else’s interests.
Here, for example, is Foxtel’s line: “The regime is already anti-competitive and clearly favours free-to-air broadcasters above Australians and above the needs of sporting bodies whose ability to invest in grassroots will be limited.” It’s not that this argument is spurious, so much as overstated. Foxtel is broadly correct that more bidders for TV rights means bigger deals, which means more money going into the coffers of sporting bodies, which they can then spend at grassroots level. And this may well turn out to be decisively true for some smaller sports, such as para sports, which are unlikely to become AFL-style behemoths through free-to-air exposure. But this argument has its limits.
A year-and-a-week ago, Australia played England in a one-day international cricket match at the MCG in front of 10,406 people. That’s roughly 90,000 empty seats greeting the national team as it played its oldest rival in one of our nation’s most popular sports. There are several reasons for that debacle: too many pointless cricket series are now played, making the sport a festival of dead rubbers played by constantly rotating and occasionally anonymous players.
Even that, I should note, is a product of the pursuit of endless TV money. But it’s also clear that something has been lost by Cricket Australia’s decision to put our national team’s white-ball games behind Foxtel’s paywall. It got more cash up front, but at the cost of our team becoming a ghost. Its games, even at home, often passing without us realising.
Here, Australian cricket walked a small way down the disastrous path English cricket pioneered in 2005. After the glorious Ashes series of that year, it cashed in, selling its broadcast rights to Sky. Then English cricket promptly all but disappeared from cultural view. The audience plummeted, and so did the sport at grassroots level. In 2008, there were about 428,000 English cricketers. Only eight years later, there were 278,000. England’s 2005 Ashes heroes got an open-top bus parade. Within a decade, a generation of English kids didn’t even know their own country’s star players. By 2017, English cricket decided to return some games to the BBC to avoid becoming, in its chief executive’s memorable phrase, “the richest, most irrelevant sport in [that] country”.
Sport is our nation’s great unifier. It’s the government’s job to protect it
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30.11.2023
What if the Matildas’ World Cup run had taken place on Foxtel, or Optus Sport, or Amazon? As sport, its merit would remain unchanged but as culture, it would have become something else entirely.
Word would have spread, news outlets would have swooned, subscriptions would have spiked, but the fervour would have been dulled. Sure, pubs and live sites would have picked up some of the slack, but there never could have been the sense we all had that everyone was watching. Together.
The Women’s World Cup would have had a hugely different community feel if it hadn’t been available on free-to-air TV.Credit: Getty
This is the best reason we have anti-siphoning laws in this country. They were introduced in the ’90s at the onset of pay-television to ensure sporting events of national significance remained on free-to-air television, accessible to all. Thus, the Olympics, the AFL and NRL finals series, the Ashes, and the Australian Open tennis (among other things) are preserved for free public consumption. That was a simple enough equation........
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