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The NBL could very well be the fastest growing sports television product in Australia, but you wouldn’t know it listening to some of the game’s followers.
‘The TV deal is holding the game back’ is a familiar cry of fans.
‘We need to ditch Ten and ONE’ is another.
Even journalist Boti Nagy – who’s doing a fantastic job pumping out NBL content right now both for News Corp Australia publications and on his own blog – is a subtle yet constant part of the chorus.
From one Boti report this season: “We’ve had the demerger and with it, all the BA-signed contracts the NBL inherited and honoured, some to its detriment.”
From another: “NBL Pty Ltd couldn’t step as far away from BA as it wanted with the demerger, due to existing TV and other contracts it inherited.”
From a story on the state of the league website: “NBL Pty Ltd is as frustrated as its growing fan base because it feels hamstrung by yet another BA deal it inherited and is stuck with for the immediate future.”
Less inconspicuously, over the winter Boti expressed the view that “if Ten wants out, why not let them?”
Plus this week, in a blog proposing a ‘Winter Superleague’ one of the key advantages raised was that “the league can do a different TV deal”.
Reading the thoughts of fans and other prominent figures can make it seem like the league is pinned down against its will, unable to grow until it’s free from this horrible TV contract.
But, as in a lot of things, there’s speculation and there’s reality.
And the reality is capital city NBL television ratings are up 44 per cent on this time last year.
Last season’s ratings themselves were 58 percent up on the previous season.
Compare that to another growing Aussie sports competition, the A-League, who benefitted from Alessandro Del Piero’s arrival last year and a free-to-air game each week on SBS2 this year.
The A-League is up 27 percent on this time last year after somewhere between a 23 and 39 percent rise last season (depending on which paragraph of this article you believe).
Now, the A-League still rates well above the NBL. Their average audience with every game being shown is 120,700, the NBL’s with two games – one on the primary channel of a major network, both typically involving capital city teams – is 52,750.
But the point here is that the current TV deal in its present form is working incredibly well for the NBL.
Ask Joe Blow on the street what the fastest growing sport on TV in Australia is and the last thing you’d expect to hear is the NBL – but it’s not inconceivable.
What has to be remembered is that the NBL is lucky to have a free-to-air deal at all.
It teamed up with Ten during the brief window they were trying to grow ONE as a sports-only channel and were hungry for any form of local content.
It was in the right place at the right time.
Despite superior viewing numbers, the A-League never found itself in such a position. Instead, they had eight seasons as a subscription-only product before free-to-air picked it up – and even when the deal came it wasn’t with one of the major networks.
To be fair, some of the NBL’s TV critics are more concerned with NBL.tv being the service providing the non-Ten games.
That’s something that should be looked at. Performance and quality of production issues affect the enjoyability of the site, and it must be remembered the business model itself is in its infancy.
Is it the best strategy that all those games are basically only available to existing fans (given the cost of subscription)?
Like with the free-to-air deal, we have to be careful about assuming there’s a market for the content outside of the current set-up. Remember it was only after NBL.tv was introduced that every NBL game was broadcast.
That said, if the NBL can wriggle out of some or all of its NBL.tv contract at the end of this season, it’d have to be heavily considered.
As for the Ten and ONE deal, we shouldn’t get too caught up with that. It’s far more of a positive than a negative.
And with the league taking back some of the control over production recently, it can only get better.
Last week’s games featured historical footage and a miked-up Trevor Gleeson. Even the horrible sneaker graphics were gone. Happy days!
All things considered, the league has a good platform for growth – a platform it was lucky to find itself on – and two more years to make the most of it.
The ratings prior to this year were never going to be enough to get a similar deal, but at the present rate of growth the NBL might just get there.