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“Too much sport is never enough”. The famous saying rings true on our televisions today, especially for those of us with pay-TV. But even for those without, turning on the TV opens up a visual smorgasbord of sporting choice.
But it wasn’t always so.
Stuart Thomas’s article on The Roar last Friday, ‘Look How Far We’ve Come‘ spoke of the rise in coverage of the round-ball football code. Although a tangential point, the first comment on the article by Correct Sometimes pointed out that “Every sport had poor coverage back in those days”. Compared to our options today, that is unquestionably true.
In that time, in the mid-1980s, I was growing up in regional Victoria. We only had the ABC and one commercial TV station. And that was it.
Melbourne wasn’t much better. There were three commercial stations plus the ABC. And SBS, but few had heard of it.
Australian football was the dominant code, and still is, but the coverage was relatively basic. TV8 showed a two-hour replay of a couple of Saturday games and a live Swans game from Sydney on Sundays once a fortnight.
The ABC showed two one-hour highlights packages of 2-3 games, the quaintly-named A Pleasant Sunday Morning and then The Winners. But up to three games a week weren’t televised at all, and on weekends where the Swans played away, there were no games shown live.
This was accepted as completely normal. How times have changed!
In summer, cricket was the sport of choice. The ABC retained the rights to Test cricket in regional areas even after the World Series split was resolved, but coverage didn’t start until 3pm. Later if there were news programs or golf being shown.
TV8 showed the World Series one-day games, cutting the coverage to go to the news on the dot of 6pm and not resuming for the night session until 7:30pm. And on Saturdays, coverage would be interrupted for horse racing.
Other sports? Forget it! Even the Sunday morning sports show was nearly all VFL and other codes struggled to get a look in. As mentioned in the comments in Friday’s article, often the only football content was a reading of the English results by Frank Villiers, who wasn’t as good as James Alexander Gordon.
The only rugby league coverage in Victoria was a live game on the ABC on Saturday afternoon. But even up in Sydney, it wasn’t much better – the only extra coverage they got up there was a 90-minute highlights package on Channel Ten on Sunday evenings.
By the early 1990s, TV networks began to realise that prime-time sport rated well. I was living in Sydney by then, and Channel Nine had taken over rugby league, showing a game on Friday night on an hour’s delay while Channel Seven was showing Friday night footy at a reasonable time in Melbourne. But neither network was prepared to take the ratings hit away from their heartland area, so Friday night AFL was shown ridiculously late in Sydney.
But, irritatingly, Channel Nine only showed the first two hours of the cricket when it was at the SCG. At the time, the commonly-believed line of thought was that showing a game live in the host city reduced attendances. Experience has proved that theory incorrect.
The coming of pay-TV in the mid-1990s fragmented the sports TV market but resulted in increased coverage. When looking for content for which people are prepared to pay, sport features prominently.
Although there was little change in the AFL coverage on free-to-air, for those prepared to pay there were more games shown. By 1996, all games were televised, although not all of them live.
But rugby league would be ripped apart, as the breakaway Super League decimated the existing ARL competition. Competing pay-TV broadcasters showed competing competitions, although Channel Nine retained the free-to-air rights for both, but not showing either before 9:30pm.
An uneasy peace would see the formation of the NRL, with both pay-TV networks showing rugby league. But other sports were split between providers and forking out money for pay-TV didn’t get a full selection of sports.
When I purchased my first pay-TV subscription, the sports channel had been taken over by Channel Seven. Seven Sport had the rights to the AFL and NRL, but not rugby union, English football or basketball. Controversially, the Seven Network bought the rights to Australian soccer, for the NSL to provide content for them. But that fell over as the NSL declined sharply and was an unhappy experience for everyone.
Within a few years, having competing pay-TV networks proved unsustainable and all sporting content came together under the Fox Sports banner. Fox became a one-stop shop for all pay-TV sport, which remained the case until Optus purchased the rights to this year’s English Premier League.
Back then, there were just two Fox Sports channels plus an AFL channel. Those three channels have now grown to many more. And with each new channel that’s added, new content needs to be added. And so sports that didn’t get a look in before find themselves shown. Sports that had less coverage now have more.
Free-to-air TV was changing as well with the introduction of multi-channelling. Networks found themselves needing to provide content for numerous channels and sport was a good way of getting programs that people would watch.
Fans outside the heartland areas of their sports were big winners. Channel Seven were unwilling to show AFL on their main channel in Sydney and Channel Nine unwilling to show NRL in Melbourne, with poor ratings outside the sports’ heartlands. But multi-channelling made it viable. AFL games on 7Mate and NRL games on Gem enable those sports to have a national free-to-air footprint.
Wherever you are in Australia, you’ll get 3-4 live AFL games per week on free-to-air and three live NRL games. We’ve come a long way since the 1980s.
Multi-channelling also allows coverage of a sport to continue even if the main channel isn’t showing it. Gone are the days of a TV sporting blackout when it’s time for the news. We all remember the farce of a big Australian Open match that had been talked up all day, only for the coverage to cease on the dot of 6pm at news time. Now it can move to 7Two and continue live to its conclusion.
We’ve seen the value of TV rights increase dramatically. While the AFL now have a contract of over $2.5 billion, other sports also are getting a lot more from the TV networks.
The networks, having paid so much, are looking to maximise the value and so the quality is steadily increasing. More camera angles, better graphics. Sharper commentary, analysis to the finest detail.
Showing games on delay is no longer an option. With social media spoilers, if a game’s not live people will know the score long before the game is shown. And when a TV network has paid top dollar for the rights, they want to maximise the ratings.
What does the future hold? It will be fascinating to find out.
Web-streaming is a growing area and will likely increase further over time. Optus’ rights to the English Premier League may be a sign of the future. Although at the moment, with frequent buffering and network outages, and the NBN being way behind schedule, maybe it’s an idea that’s ahead of its time.
There’s no doubt web-streaming has value for grassroots sports and competitions that would never make it to TV, enabling a niche to be catered for.
Whether the quality of Australian broadband is adequate to enable streaming behind a paywall is debatable. But as internet speeds increase in the future, the line between television and the internet will become more blurred and it will be increasingly possible to pick and choose sporting subscriptions to match the specific competitions or teams you’re interested in.
It’s a contrast to Fox, where one subscription gives you everything even though you may only want to watch some sports and not others.
But although losing the live EPL removes Fox’s status as a one-stop shop, they’re not going down without a fight. Fox have picked up a 24-hour channel for my favourite EPL club, which although not showing the games live in the middle of the night will show them several times while I’m awake.
They’ve also added three BeIn channels with international sporting content that was never previously available in Australia.
We’ve seen telecasts where, by pressing a button, we can select different camera angles or commentary. We’ve seen games where tweets have scrolled across the screen, allowing viewers to have their say on what they’re watching. No doubt we’ll see more ways for viewers to interact with the games in future.
Long gone are the days of turning the TV on and there’s no sport on. Now we have more choices than ever before. A range of choices that is only going to continue to increase.
The viewers are increasingly in control. And don’t we love it!
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