TVNZ brings sport back to the masses (maybe)
Media expert Duncan Greive analyses the state broadcaster's (re)commitment to sport; PLUS: a busy Week That Was and busier Weekend That Will Be.
With permission from Duncan Greive and The Spinoff, The Bounce reproduces in full his analysis of TVNZ’s intriguing and potentially game-changing move back to free-to-air sport.
A new free-to-access sports hub is coming to TVNZ+ on July 1st. Duncan Greive analyses what that means for the network – and for Sky.
What just happened?
Last month marked 33 years since Sky TV arrived in New Zealand, and began the process of erecting the original paywall, one which over time wrapped itself around almost all live sport. Unlike in many other countries, such as Australia, there is no legal mandate for major sporting events to appear on free-to-access platforms, meaning that aside from the odd Olympics, World Cup or Sunday afternoon motor racing coverage, sport has largely disappeared from our biggest TV channels.
Next month sees the most significant change to that orthodoxy in generations. TVNZ+, the streaming platform run by our biggest state-owned media company, has announced a new “sports hub”, which will nest “live events, replays and highlights”. This has been made possible by Spark’s decision to abruptly exit the sports market, and TVNZ’s nimble swoop in to pick up its long-term rights deals.
It complements what will be an extensive slate of live sport on linear television, growing out of TVNZ’s work as linear partner for Spark Sport on cricket. Crucially, while Spark could only ever view sport as tangential to its core telecommunications business, for TVNZ selling ads against content has been its sole revenue model for decades. It has also recruited Scotty Stevenson to continue the role he filled at Spark leading its sport coverage, joining the company’s head of sport Melodie Robinson as a formidable duo charged with building the presentation of the product.
How much sport do they actually have?
It’s a long way from Sky’s kaleidoscopic range, but from day one it will be far more than has been freely available since the 1990s. The centrepiece is cricket: home internationals, Super Smash, and domestic one-day finals, bundled with English cricket, beginning with the second Ashes Test.
There’s a very strong roster of women’s sport, something Sky has also emphasised in recent years. This includes WTA tennis, women’s Super League and FA Cup football, Australian netball and Ladies European Tour golf. The balance is a little less coherent, with some NFL, FIBA basketball, a bit of Northern hemisphere rugby, World Rally, MotoGP, Diamond League Athletics, along with a few marquee events like golf's US Open. The biggest hole is local content, outside of cricket. Which leads to a key question...
How do NZ sports organisations feel about this?
Colour them intrigued. You can consider the last 30 years as a giant experiment: what happens if you make the vast majority of local and international sport accessible only to the wealthiest and oldest half of New Zealand households? While correlation isn’t strictly causation, many traditionally strong New Zealand domestic sports are seeing plunging attendance and participation rates, which rightly concerns their administrators.
The prospect of TVNZ entering the sports market in a profound way will be extremely interesting from that perspective. A number of second- and third-tier sports earn relatively little (or even nothing) from Sky, so the prospect of having their content made more accessible will be exciting. The big cost is often the outside broadcasting trucks and commentary staff, but if TVNZ is able to commit to that – or a third party can figure out the funding piece (maybe the government, see below) – then suddenly you might have competition and a compelling argument for shifting platform for the likes of hockey, domestic football or local rugby league.
Should Sky be worried?
For the bigger professional sports, the state will likely never be able to build a plausible revenue case to match Sky’s bids, so rugby, netball and NRL are likely staying put (and some have deals signed away for years to come). Yet the experience of cricket is instructive. Since returning to free-to-air it has seen attendances rise, and the overall visibility and cultural impact of the sport change. This is not necessarily due to leaving Sky – everything from a generation of quality players to the ACC’s cult fandom has helped. But the case for splitting rights and ensuring that some games show on major free-to-air platforms is far stronger now. It should also be seen in the context of Stuff’s screening of the 2023 Fifa Women’s World Cup – all sports seem much more open to a creative approach to audience building than they might have been historically.
Sky will have its own research and theory of how impactful it would be for it to lose, say, some Super Rugby and netball games. It works in Australia for Foxtel, and could view free-to-air as advertising for its more complete coverage. Sky can also point to its free-to-air channel Prime, which has screened a selection of sports for decades, and has the 2023 men’s Rugby World Cup looming. But Prime is just not in most people’s consideration set and it has no streaming platform of its own. In an era of fast-declining TV ratings, and with Sky in not much more than a third of households, it might be best-placed to try and embrace a more pluralistic era, with sports rights split into tranches, rather than try and defend one which has already passed.
Should TVNZ be excited?
It’s important to note that sport rights are always rented by broadcasters – but even by those standards, TVNZ is far from committed. What happened with Spark Sport was a one-time chance at the ultimate opportunist move, but it remains unclear whether it will be the beginning of a strategic move back to sports, or simply a fun couple of years.
It is worth noting that it fits a global trend toward sport returning to free-to-air. The Phoenix Suns, home of megastar Kevin Durant, recently made headlines when they jettisoned their pay TV deal in favour of local free-to-air coverage, citing audience size as part of the justification. Most crucially, live sport attracts people to linear TV in large numbers, and is a great advertising product – there is a strong commercial rationale behind a more long-term return to sport for the last of the linear era. There’s still the long-rumoured idea of a paid streaming TVNZ product, which would make the argument for sport even more compelling.
Still, the big thing holding TVNZ back is the fact it currently has two confirmed board members and no permanent CEO. Broadcasting minister Willie Jackson has indicated he wants to see a much greater public media mandate at TVNZ, which irks some TVNZ staff who think it already fulfils that, and Jackson just needs to watch more TVNZ content.
This gets political very quickly
Does Jackson view sport as public media? That’s very much in the eye of the beholder – and the incoming board, along with the CEO it chooses. But whether sport is public media is an important question. We know sports minister Grant Robertson is a fan, but how does he feel about its relationship with TV? What about associate health minister and public health expert Ayesha Verral?
Too many ministers, surely. But sport invariably connects to multiple portfolios. Major events receive their own funding, and often precipitate large infrastructure projects. The state spends millions of dollars every year on public health messaging, and on funding productions for screens, sport could plausibly be connected to either. There’s a well-known connection between physical activity and health – the government could make an argument that funding the screening of sport on free-to-air helps keep young people out of hospital. All conjecture, sure – but TVNZ’s move into sport puts all this on the table.
The merger is dead and buried, but Willie Jackson has made it very clear that he still has big plans for TVNZ. The move into sport was a sharp tactical play from TVNZ, but whether it makes its way upstream into strategy is still far from clear. The identities of the new TVNZ board will become known within weeks – after choosing a CEO, their next big decision will be on whether to just have a couple of years of fun with their new sports rights, or consider going all-in.
Read more by Greive:
‘Like a clandestine P lab in the newsroom’: The incredible true story of the ACC (The Spinoff, 2022)
WTC final, Day 2
Australia 469, India 151-5
About three days ago I would have put England as slight favourites to win the Ashes on home soil. After two days of what is shaping as a comprehensive dismantling of India in the World Test Championship final, I’m leaning back towards Australia, particularly in the first test that starts at Edgbaston next Friday.
They’re turning this final at The Oval into a procession, almost immediately proving that their first innings, bolstered by brilliant hundreds from Travis Head and Steven Smith, was a grossly inflated total as it relates to the conditions. Much like the final of two years ago, the inconsistent bounce and at times extravagant movement should have made this a 250-300 per-innings wicket. Instead, Head and Smith put 285 together for a single wicket.
After the last home summer, we should not be shocked by anything test cricket throws at you, but it is near impossible to chart a path back into this final for India, barring a ruinous Australian second-innings collapse.
One thing to listen out for: the drums will start beating for the next final to be either at Ahmedabad, Kolkata or Mumbai.
And why not?
Australia v India, WTC final day 3, The Oval, tonight 9.30pm, Sky Sport 3
The Week That Was
Will LIV live or will it fade away now that the Saudi PIF has bought directly into the world’s two most established golf tours? Golf.com’s James Colgan answers the 21 burning questions from the ‘shock’ announcement. Given that he admits to being as blindsided as anybody by the merger, I’m not sure he’s got everything right. When answering the question about what LIV gets out of it, he writes:
In the midst of a floundering second season, the upstart league gets an insane boost to its chances at longevity (owed to the PIF’s investment in it) and possibly even the opportunity to add the very best players on the PGA Tour to its weekly product.
The key words there are “floundering second season”. LIV was still viewed as gimmick golf and that’s not what PIF head Yasir Al-Rumayyan wanted when pouring billions into the sport. Now he has the ‘legitimate’ tours under his control as chairman of the new entity, it is easy to envisage a scenario where the PGA and DP World tours co-opt some of the upstart tour’s better ideas, fold the LIV players back into their midst and let LIV fade to black.
Either way, this is the story that just keeps giving.
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On a not unrelated subject, Lionel Messi might have rejected the Saudi football league, but Karim Benzema didn’t, leaving Real Madrid for champions Al-Ittihad.
The story of the match-fixing scandal in snooker is bleakly fascinating, particularly the corrupting of brilliant young Chinese players by older and less talented pros.
Snooker must be one of the easiest sports to ‘fix’, but authorities are not mucking around, banning two of the ringleaders, Liang Wenbo and Li Hang, for life and several others for shorter terms (per the BBC).
The Weekend That Will Be
Whether live or delayed, in part or in full, this is what I’ll be across this weekend.
I absolutely stand by my quarter-final rankings from Tuesday. Listed in order of anticipation here (all Sky Sport 1).
Brumbies v Hurricanes, Canberra, tomorrow 9.35pm
Chiefs v Reds, Hamilton, tomorrow 4.35pm
Crusaders v Fijian Drua, Christchurch, tomorrow 7.05pm
Blues v Waratahs, Auckland, tonight 7.35pm
From my faithful Warriors correspondent Peter:
Easy like a Sunday morning. Lionel obviously knows how a Warriors fan feels after a Saturday night win, especially one where we scored five tries, two of them sparkling efforts from our favourite halfback. True, it was a depleted Dolphins side missing four key players, but the return of Mitchell Barnett, the vigour of Marata Niukore and the one-man show that is Dallin Watene-Zelzniak, had the faithful in raptures.
No doubt the boys belted out their victory song after the game, but I hope that Andrew ‘Webby’ Webster was already plotting the downfall of the crowd from Canberra, notoriously difficult to beat in the capital.
We will need every man to approach this match with some vital qualities. First, mental toughness. The Raiders excel in creating a harsh environment with the meanest, most vocal crowd in the NRL willing their team on and influencing the officials. They will also have to exhibit more accuracy in the finer points of the game - those little moments (like Marcelo Montoya batting the ball out when he could have kept it in) that can turn a match. The short kicking has to improve as does the timing of the pass because it looks like we’re starting to create more attacking opportunities.
They must travel to Canberra with a diamond-hard attitude, believing that they are a top-eight side who can beat a team above them on the ladder.
If they can do that tonight, I’ll be dancing on the ceiling!
Canberra v NZ Warriors, Canberra, tonight 8pm, Sky Sport 4
It’s the No-1 seed v No-3 seed. More than that, it’s the flickering embers of the Big Three (sorry Andy Murray) era versus Generation Next. The team at The Bounce has no problem confessing that they’re in Carlos Alcaraz’s corner in his bid to topple 22-time grand slam winner Novak Djokovic. Former French open winner Michael Chang believes the Serb will have to take a lot of chances if he is to have any hope of beating the Spaniard.
“Novak is going to have to play offensive tennis. He’s going to have to take some balls early, take some chances and he's going to have to do it consistently. I don’t think he's going to want to be out there playing 10 feet back, tracking balls down side to side with a guy who’s younger, who’s incredibly fit [and] incredibly hungry to win.
Alcaraz v Djokovic, French Open semifinal, tomorrow 12.45am, Sky Sport 2
One half of the women’s final was utterly predictable. The other half less so.
Iga Swiatek v Karolina Muchova, French Open final, Sunday 1am, Sky Sport 2
This fella Nikola Jokic can really play!
Per Axios Sports:
Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray became the first teammates in NBA history to each record 30-point triple-doubles in the same game (regular season or playoffs). To reiterate: What they did has never been done before in any game — and they just did it in the NBA Finals.
Jokić recorded the first 30-20-10 game in NBA Finals history and the third 30-20-10 playoff game of his career. There have only been two others — one each by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain. The two-time MVP also became the first player ever with 10 triple-doubles in a single postseason.
Folks, no exaggeration: We’re witnessing one of the greatest individual playoff runs in NBA history.
Miami Heat v Denver Nuggets, Miami, tomorrow 12.30pm, ESPN
The mythology that envelopes the Le Mans 24-hour race can often be more compelling than the actual race (see, Ford v Ferrari).
With three Kiwis involved - Brendon Hartley, Earl Bamber and Scott Dixon, the former in a Toyota, the latter two in Cadillacs - you’re duty bound to check in from time to time as the hypercars scream around the Circuit de la Sarthe and through iconic sections like the Porsche Curves, the Ford Chicanes, the Tetre Rouge and the mighty Mulsane Straight.
24 Hours of Le Mans, Sunday 2am, Sky Sport 5
The famed treble awaits state-sponsored Manchester City and, quite honestly, it is difficult to conceive of a way Internazionale can prevent it happening short of a new keeper called Divine Intervention manning their goal. On paper, this is a huge mismatch but hey, Buster Douglas once beat Mike Tyson, so there’s that.
Manchester City v Inter Milan, Sunday 7am, Spark Sport
Nice to see Michael Venus getting to another final. Like you I'm firmly in the Alcaraz camp, can't deny Jokos skill but it's time for a change of guard.
Really looking forward to more FTA sport, sky is good but being able to see cricket away from a paywall will be great. I thought Spark had the FIH league too or was I mistaken?
The proposed PGA Tour-Liv Golf merger is far from a done deal. As more than one US sporting body can attest, US antitrust laws may have something to say. Courtesy of Marc Edelman of The Atlantic:
The most basic principle of US antitrust law is that companies with large market share can’t make agreements to avoid competing against each other. It is very difficult to characterize the PGA-LIV merger in any other way. The antitrust suit originally filed last year by a group of LIV players alleged that without “any meaningful competition (prior to LIV Golf’s entry), the Tour has failed to innovate and its product has grown stale.” The PGA Tour, they argued, “has used its monopoly position to extract substantially increased revenues from broadcasters and advertisers” while paying players less “because there is no competition for players’ services.”
LIV Golf eventually joined its golfers as a plaintiff in this very lawsuit. To now claim that a combined PGA-LIV entity is something less than a monopoly would lack any semblance of credibility. The merger would leave just a single, dominant association controlling almost the entire world of professional golf. Even if the PGA Tour was not a monopoly before the proposed merger, the new entity certainly would create one.
The proposed merger between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf is not as good as done. At a minimum, antitrust enforcers will conduct a thorough investigation before even considering letting the deal through. The time, cost, and loss of privacy associated with this process could be enough to lead one, if not both, of the associations to walk away.