The All Blacks haka. Photo / Photosport
OPINION:
New Zealanders may not fully understand how badly off they are when it comes to live sports broadcasts.
Many parts of the world can turn on the telly and watch quality sport for free: their heroes as large as life in their living rooms without a cent having been spent.
Some of that free-to-air access is protected by anti-siphoning laws, with Governments having intervened at the start of the satellite TV boom to ensure events such as the Olympics remained accessible to everyone.
But there is also a strong belief in the UK, Australia, USA and much of Europe that sport can’t survive if it’s all behind a paywall.
Sell everything to a pay-TV operator and millions of households will never see their heroes, or the big moments that have the power to inspire.
They won’t harbour dreams to play at the highest level, but much worse, they won’t even foster aspirations to participate.
High-profile sport needs to be visible. It needs to be accessible to some extent and not the exclusive preserve of those with the disposable income to afford it.
In the UK, the Six Nations is all on the free-to-air BBC and ITV. The AFL agreement ensures that all marquee matches around public holidays and landmark dates are live on free-to-air.
The NFL has big games on free-to-air and a major reason these competitions continue to grow in popularity is because they are accessible to everyone.
Sports bodies and competitions that have pursued a hybrid model of selling broadcast rights to both subscription and free-to-air channels have been significantly more successful in growing audience, profile and revenue than those who have thrown everything they own behind a paywall.
New Zealand has no anti-siphoning laws and sits as one of the few countries in the world with virtually no high-profile sport on free-to-air.
Every major sports body has prioritised cash over audience and New Zealand, therefore, is the country where fans are ripped off the most — forced to pay to watch all their national teams and told it’s a privilege and not a right to cheer for their own.
This whole issue of being ripped off came up this week when Sky TV announced that it will be broadcasting six live Rugby World Cup games on its free-to-air channel, Prime, and another six on delay.
The masses will be expected to be eternally grateful they will be able to watch six live games for free, but these are going to be shown on Prime only because it’s a condition imposed by World Rugby.
New Zealanders are being offered the bare minimum free-to-air Rugby World Cup content, and just to highlight that this is the thin end of the wedge, all 48 games will be live on ITV in the UK.
Just as all games at last year’s Fifa World Cup were live on BBC and ITV, as was Wimbledon, the Olympics and the Grand National.
The fact the Black Caps and a smattering of other content is now available on TVNZ, is not by design, but by default.
Spark wanted to shut down Spark Sport and offload the liability of its existing obligations, and the quickest and easiest way to do that was to hand everything it owned to TVNZ.
However it came about, though, there is now an opportunity for TVNZ to showcase the value of free-to-air, and to deliver a data set that will prove to sports bodies in New Zealand that they need to rethink their obsession with pay-TV operators.
And no sport needs to be thinking about this harder than rugby, which is facing a participation crisis among teenage boys and in desperate need to find ways to boost audience interest in Super Rugby.
There are multiple factors driving teenage boys away from rugby and it would be naive to argue that sticking a handful of Super Rugby games live on TVNZ or Three would suddenly arrest the decline.
But it would help rugby sell itself as meaningful, credible and aspirational if it were more visible in more homes.
And now the Black Caps have found a new partner in TVNZ, rugby runs the risk of more kids being inclined to play cricket simply because they have had greater exposure to it.
Free-to-air channels have power when it comes to driving participation — see how many people in the UK take to playing tennis when Wimbledon is dominating time slots on the BBC.
The argument against opening professional rugby to free-to-air exposure has always been economic. NZR is sitting on a $100m-a-year deal with Sky, which simply wouldn’t pay that amount if it were sharing content with free-to-air providers.
That argument is broadly true, but it fails to put any future value on audience growth and ignores the evidence that hybrid contracts in other countries have worked symbiotically, with the free-to-air component driving more people to the pay TV operator.
Super Rugby, having disillusioned so many fans by its constant format changes, lopsided fixtures and nonsensical playoff structure, doesn’t appear to have a sustainable future if the content remains exclusively on Sky.
Super Rugby needs some kind of help in winning back fans and engaging new ones, and screams out as a competition that would benefit from a free-to-air partnership.
A few big local games — Blues v Crusaders and Hurricanes v Chiefs — being broadcast live on TVNZ or Three shouldn’t be seen as a nice-to-have by NZR, but a must-have.
And for different reasons, NZR needs to be thinking about getting the All Blacks out from under Sky’s clutches.
Rugby calls itself the national game and the All Blacks are set up as the people’s team and yet, excluding World Cups, when was the last time a test match was live on a free-to-air channel?
Having spent 27 years behind a paywall, the All Blacks have become the team of the affluent.
It’s wrong that Kiwis always have to pay to see the All Blacks and almost immoral that parents and families of the players, after investing years of time and money in their kid, then have to fork out for a Sky subscription on top of everything else to see their child play in the black jersey.
New Zealanders get a terrible deal when it comes to sport.
OPINION: Sport, with its fine margins such as this, can be beautiful and brutal.