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I recently put the blowtorch on NRL crowds for season 2013, and television ratings have also been in decline. Is the NRL in trouble, or is there something beneath the surface that explains it all?
In an article last week, News Corp’s Josh Massoud reported that at the halfway point of the season ratings for the Nine Network and Fox Sports were down 3 percent and 2.6 percent respectively.
By the end of the season, Nine’s ratings continued to go south from 3 percent to 3.8 percent overall, while Fox dropped to 8.5 percent by season’s end.
What happened to NRL’s ratings on Fox Sports? It’s a massive drop from 2.6 percent to 8.5 percent in just 13 weeks.
I can understand why Nine’s ratings were in decline, thanks to ill-informed choices such as picking last-placed Parramatta to appear four times on free-to-air in the last six rounds.
And of course, there’s Nine’s infamous and outdated delayed coverage of two free-to-air games per week.
Television networks have blamed the NRL’s 20 round fixed schedule for the drop off in ratings.
I disagree. The real problem is the choice of matches that the television networks select.
This is the first year of the NRL’s $1.025 billion deal, with broadcasts shared by Nine and Fox.
That deal doesn’t include digital rights, for which the NRL signed off on a five-year deal with Telstra to tune of $150 million.
That deal it is a joint venture of the NRL and Telstra. It broadcasts at least six NRL games live each week and two matches on delay (from the Nine Network) on mobile phones and tablets.
More importantly, part of the deal is the establishment of the NRL Digital Media unit.
In late July, the Australian Financial Review‘s John Stensholt wrote an article headlined “Digital deal scores with NRL fans as millions go online“.
It contained a the following interesting tidbits about the how the game is travelling online, and the use of mobile phones and tablet apps:
– There were more than two million downloads of the new NRL Live app on smartphones and iPad, and more than one million video views on the app alone.
– Video views on NRL.com have more than doubled to 1.6 million compared with the same time in the 2012 season, and the site is averaging 600,000 unique browsers every month.
– Individual users on the website is up 27 percent in 2013 compared with last year, while time spent on the NRL’s relaunched mobile site network has increased by 40 percent.
Bear in mind, that information is up to date as of 29 July this year.
Later in that article, there was something significant that caught my eye.
The NRL’s director of commercial and marketing, Paul Kind said that the site and the apps should be more popular next year.
“With our iPad app, for example, we did not get that out to the market until State of Origin began [in early June]. Given the contract with Telstra was only signed in December, a lot of this year has been about getting things onto the market, so we would expect the numbers to go up a lot more next year.”
So what Kind is saying is that the NRL app on the iPad was only available at the halfway mark of the NRL season.
Since then, you would imagine, NRL fans have been downloading the iPad app in the second half of the NRL season.
It’s also around the same time that Fox Sports’ ratings began haemorrhaging.
Have NRL fans turned off Fox and made the switch to watching matches from their mobile tablet devices? It would be interesting to see what the actual figures are.
The cost of watching via digital live-streaming service online tablet devises is $89 for the full season. Compare that with Fox, where you pay $75.50 a month for the mandatory essentials package and the added sports option.
There are some challenges ahead for both the Nine Network and Fox Sports.
Will Nine continue with their delayed coverage of two free-to-air matches per week for the remaining four years of their contract?
Will Fox continue to charge NRL fans $75.50 a month?
How can Fox entice NRL fans to buy a pay TV subscription? An NRL channel maybe?
More importantly, how will Dave Smith and the NRL commission come up with a solution on how stop the freefall of TVratings?
They need to work in concert with the Nine Network and Fox Sports to solve the problem.
Then again, it could come down to the fact that some of the most popular NRL teams struggled to make an impact on the field. And that everyone, including yours truly is reading too much into this.
Interesting times ahead for season 2014 and beyond.
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