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Cricket Australia’s new billion-dollar broadcasting deal has created a polarising view on the economics and ethics behind our nation’s most beloved sport and how, let alone if, we can watch it.
There are two main sides to the great broadcast debate, those who have Foxtel already, and those who don’t want to pay for it.
But what about those fans who can physically not access it?
I, like all of us here, am a die hard cricket fan. I bleed green and gold. I wake up at 3am to watch the side lose in an ODI, just to wake up again the next day to watch them lose a T20. I have alarms set for 1am on each of the days of the Redbacks Shield campaign so that I don’t miss a second of the action, and a pulled five-sick days in a row to watch the first Ashes Test in 2013-14.
Most of all, I paid my 70 dollars for my Live Pass from Cricket Australia.
This used to get me the same basic coverage as any Australian living in the mainland but from the comfort of my apartment in Amsterdam. As of two weeks ago, however, the Cricket Australia Live App, cricket.com.au and the so-called ‘Cricket Network’ have stopped offering any paywall service to Australians (and non-Australians) who live abroad. All 310,000+ of us.
In efforts to make Australian cricket more popular than ever, making it physically impossible to watch games that sit behind a paywall is a colossal step in the opposite direction.
One option to get around such utter corporate stupidity could be to buy a subscription to Foxtel. Simple right? Just do what every other Australian has to do under the new broadcast deal. I would be fine with doing so, except for the fact that Foxtel subscriptions are also geo-restricted.
Australia cricket player Kane Richardson and his teammates (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)
Oh! What about the new revolutionary Foxtel subscription platform that is supposed to be the “Netflix of Sports Coverage” Kayo Sports? You guessed it, also geo-restricted.
This leaves the 1.3 per cent of total Australians that live abroad, no legal way to watch paywall cricket.
I’m fine with paying for my cricket. But at least let me do so. Otherwise I’ll just sit through the 1,500th Toyota Corolla advert on a dodgy website that still has Ricky Ponting as the face Cricket Australia and the New Zealand flag as our own, at least they care about audience accessibility.
No matter where I was living at the time, whether it be India, Russia, Slovenia or Malaysia, watching the cricket with my family in our living room was an integral part of my childhood.
So not only does it sadden me deeply, it also angers me greatly, that many kids, just like myself, will now grow up unable to physically access the cricket, and as a result, might lose touch to a vital part in what makes them feel Australian, even if they don’t live there.
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