Channel Nine's sporting coverage hurting national sport

Didn't we have this conversation before....Channel Nines coverage of Union is piss poor as it is ,,,Give it back to Seven at least they play it live ....I am sick of of TCN hogging it all and making me endure hours of Rugby League semi finals whilst our national teams gets rated second and plays back late at night in a time slot where abdominal work out machines and desperado adult only shonky connect numbers are advertised..... Give it back TCN you have taken it from us....

Hi guys, I wrote to the minister regarding channel 9's Wallaby coverage of the Scotland game, or lack there of. The minister noted that channel 9 did not apply for coverage. Email me if you would like a copy vix0987@yahoo.com. You will not that channel 9 have blocked all of thier Facebook fans from commenting on the timeline and I have been blocked from thier WWOS page After I posted the Rugby Championship fixtures for them so they could schedule matches. I for one believe I have the right to watch my National team play on free to air TV.

Thanks Bondy, I think that a lot of FIFA's restrictions also stem from the laws relating to certain advertising in many of their big TV markets. There are laws restricting the amount of advertising of alcoholic drinks in France for example (although Budweiser's sponsorship deal with the World Cup seems to be permitted, perhaps because it's unlikely that any self-respecting Frenchman would drink the stuff!), and there are massive restrictions on betting advertising in the UK. Again, I don't often agree with FIFA, but on occasion they do some things right.

Article this morning on The Age further demonstrating the self serving nature of our pollies and the media environment we live in. Time to make them accountable to the sports fans they purport to represent (al the while with the snouts in the troth). from http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/afl-tops-list-of-politician-freebies-20120831-255z4.html "Communications Minister Senator Conroy is a well-known sports fan but also sets vital regulations that significantly affect media companies and the major sporting codes, including what games will be reserved for free-to-air TV. As well as accepting his cache of AFL tickets, Senator Conroy went to the Australian Open tennis courtesy of Channel Seven and attended Test cricket thanks to Channel Nine. Channel Ten paid for him to go to the formula one grand prix, while SBS stumped up tickets for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa."

Hardcore. Good post fair points ,when SBS did the fifa world cup it was 64-65 "including final" live games including commentary,no adds during play and also we dont mark our pitches with advertising either you wont find beer or bourbon commercial advertising sprayed onto the pitch thats illegal as well not just for world cups either.

I'm not usually one for defending FIFA, but one of the few decent things that they do is to stipulate that any network that wins the rights to the World Cup has to show all the matches live, or as near to live as possible when matches clash. This prevents situations like that affecting us during last year's Rugby World Cup where Nine buried the comp so it wouldn't clash with the NRL finals, and rarely showed matches not involving Australia. I believe that FIFA also demand that games can't be interrupted by ads, and networks have to provide a certain standard of commentary and analysis (rather than just use a feed from NZ, are you paying attention Nine?). The idea behind all this is to ensure that the game gets the best possible coverage and continues to grow. These rules are probably there to ensure that Sepp Blatter and his cronies continue to rake in the cash by having the sport grow ever larger, but they do also mean that fans get to see the full tournament. If only the RFU, the IOC and others would demand the same.

There should be laws against purchasing rights to something purely to stop other broadcasters from showing them. There needs to be a minimum broadcasting requirement.

Faark you channel nine. Because of your pathetic sports coverage i will never watch your channel again. The age of the Internet means i can watch every game live streamed right to my LCD no ads no bulshyt. You just spent a Billion dollars buying the rights to the NRL yet i will enjoy every game i wish to watch for free without ever watching your pathetic channel. You suck. Any other channel i would watch a game but i'd rather use my bandwidth then have to click onto your channel again. Sort it out before you lose more viewers.

If you wanted a statement with no evidence or analysis you should have tuned into Nine News

Exactly. Does the Government even have a future plan for the ABC?

There's nothing wrong with that though.

Skip - Facts are that the vast majority of the public love winners. We simply don't win often enough against the All Blacks for average Joe Public to want to sit & watch, support, pay money for the Rugby product. The Springboks & Pumas may be of interest to rusted-on Rugby fans but not for the majority of sports fans. And the British & Irish Lions could be a boost for Rugby in Australia, it also has the potential to cause real damage to the Australian Rugby scene if we continue to play as we have been. Sports fans love people who win or at least have a real go. Rugby far too often looks decidely second rate alongside AFL & Rugby League. Commercial decisions are based on tough 'what will bring in the numbers' & sadly Rugby is way back in that race, if it ever started. I have played & followed Rugby for more than 50 years and even I have a love hate relationship with it.

Unfortunately Nine could be seen as the lesser of three evils. Nine's coverage of pretty much everything (except the cricket before the retirement of Richie), is pretty awful. Eddie Mcguire shouldn't be allowed to host anything besides gameshows. Even his AFL commentary is awful. What are they thinking allowing the President of one of the clubs to commentate? Potential bias anyone? The only thing Nine has going for it is the fact they aren't Seven or Ten. Remember when Ten had the rugby? Remember Buddha's endless shouts of 'over' - pronounced 'auwvaaaaaah' for some reason. Or the occasions when they wouldn't show the Wallabies overseas games live due to the timezone.They'd show them in the mornings. No complaints there, not a bad way to have Sunday breakfast. However they'd insist during every ad break, even in the one between the anthems and the kickoff, of previewing the news headlines for the upcoming midday news - INCLUDING THE FINAL SCORE!! Or when Seven got the rights to the rugby world cup in Australia, and insisted on showing their 'rugby club' farce every single night - instead of actually showing the matches that were on that night. They'd even subject us to 'Kochie' jelly-wrestling some has been celebrity, instead of showing even 2 seconds of the Argentina match which was on the same night. The sooner siphoning laws are scrapped the better. They don't provide access to sports for all Australians they just provide the big three with another opportunity to hoard their property so no-one else can show it. I sometimes think Nine only bid for the Union so it could prevent a rival code to the league getting decent ccoverage on FTA. Sort of like how in the bad old days the Roosters and a couple of other teams used to sign up the two or three best players in a single key position like 5/8th or halfback just to stop them from playing somewhere else.

So in summary; Channel Nine enjoy a priviledged position by being able to play sports broker thanks to the anti siphoning laws, but have no obligation to show live or near live. A big thank you to Channel Nine and the Politicians that go to grand finals as a guest of the network (Senator Conroy). We taxpayers and residents appreciate the shafting.

i am definitely no fan of channel 9. proplem is there are a lot of people out there that are not sports lovers. Karate Kid was played instead of the rugby because channel 9 decided that more people wanted to watch Karate Kid. it really sux for us but thats the way it is and channel 9 is under no obligation to rugby fans

i'd back a compulsory tv licence fee if it meant abc and sbs could bid for sport like the bbc.

I've been thinking a little more about FTA Rugby coverage of late. The fact is that only about 40mins of an 80min match are 'ball in play' time where fan attention is narrowly fixed on the play. This has been touted as a negative previously. And, when fans are waiting for another lineout or scrum to form up, or for another restart to be set or another kicker to go through their penalty goal routine, there is plenty of thumb twiddling time. Why is it that FTA promoters don't use all these natural stoppages to provide on screem advertising? But, instead of cutting to full on ad break (where people tend to zone out or head to the kitchen for another drink) why don't they utilise some kind of split screen? Simply split your screen in two, with an ad on the top (the commentators on mute!) and the live coverage on the bottom half. Most often it would just be the two sides walking to the lineout for 20 seconds or the players grabbing a drink while a player is attended to by the medics. This method would also not create such an emphatic 'cut' between the game and the advertising. It would be similar to how the NRL commentators drop links to other shows on the TV channel coming up, but would allow for proper consumer advertising time to rise significantly. This would then allow the ARU to turn what many to be a negative aspect of the game coverage into a positive one.

Due to the way they are funded the ABC has little money. They shut down their Asia Pacific service which had Rugby broadcasts on it to Asian markets. Makes you wonder how they could fund the extra digital channels and a 24 hour news channel (which just rolls and repeats itself). Their website isn't great either.

What do you mean since 2007? Nine did the AFL coverage before that for years and completely sucked at it. It was like Community TV doing it and they shelved it so they could 'upsell you' to their sister product Fox Sports, same goes with cricket. Talk about monopolies there in what Nine and Fox Sports get up to, how the hell is that not illegal is beyond me. The Howzat show made me laugh in how they 'saved cricket'. Before Nine you had ad free cricket until the conclusion of play, no ifs, buts of maybes. You got ALL the CRICKET on ABC. What I would love to see is the ABC bid for the rights for all Australia's overseas cricket matches, including Ashes, one dayers, World Cups etc.. Then people will see for themselves the shafting that has gone on for 30 years under extreme commercialism.

Its hard to believe you lot can turn a whinge about TV into such a long blog. My attention span is way too short. Now where is my Foxtel remote ...