Tight Five with Elliott Smith: The early verdict on NZR+

NZR+ features documentaries, short films, lifestyle content, highlights and match replays. Photo / NZR+

Elliott Smith reviews NZR+, the latest digital product from New Zealand Rugby.

An explanation ...

NZR+ has captured plenty of headlines in recent months — with the remit of the service kept under wraps until recent days.

For now, it’s a content warehouse for documentaries, old highlights and retrospectives.

The early verdict? Promising. Although converting this audience into a paying one eventually — it must surely need to wash its face at some point — is going to be the hard part in a world where streaming services are plenty but precious few make money.

The first thing that strikes you — in series capturing the 2022 All Blacks and Black Ferns seasons — is how slick they look. They wouldn’t feel out of place on Netflix. They follow a similar formula too — behind-the-scenes footage, talking-heads interviews in a house or dimly lit warehouse, and in-game clips.

A question ...

Is the content any good? The first four episodes of the All Blacks: In Their Own Words series are immediately better than the All or Nothing series Amazon produced in 2017 that felt as if you were never quite getting the inside tale of the All Blacks that had been promised — in fact it felt like there was a facade at times — especially compared with the previous iterations of All or Nothing that unlocked Premier League teams and NFL franchises.

An observation ...

The All Blacks series immediately promises, via Richie Mo’unga, that people need to know the truth about their 2022 season.

Do we get it? Mostly.

Remarkably for an in-house production — with the help of Whisper Studios — the content feels honest, with coach Ian Foster offering comments on how he’d resigned himself to the Ellis Park win in South Africa being his last test and that he sat by himself at fulltime and shed a few tears.

While the impact of the Irish series defeat is discussed, we’re plunged into it after the fact and it would have been interesting to dig a little deeper.

The first three episodes of four are strongest, while the last feels like an end-of-year tour recap — although Aaron Smith, who is vulnerable throughout, provides a strong coda to that episode as he ponders life outside the All Blacks after this year.

An explanation ...

The in-house presence and level of trust probably prove the key to some of the series’ more-vulnerable moments, with the interviews conducted by All Blacks media manager Matt Manukia, who uses his background as a journalist for TVNZ to tease the best out of the subjects.

What could have been sycophantic doesn’t feel like it. Some elements don’t work or are clearly tuned to an international audience but, given it could have ended up like the in-house Premier League channels (I can’t watch the content my own team produces, it’s that bad) that make North Korean television feel balanced, it works.

A prediction ...

Keeping the content coming will be the hard part. There’s a Taika Waititi series coming on rugby in France in time for the World Cup and there is a myriad hand-picked classic games (if you’ve ever wanted to revisit the 2013 Rebels v Highlanders game for some reason, now is your chance) but Disney+, Netflix et al have found avoiding churn in customers is difficult.

An out-of-the-box year, 2022 made for ideal documentary viewing, but as the latter, weaker seasons of Drive to Survive have fallen into, it can become a monotonous year in review (then this happened, then that happened ...) quickly rather than a documentary with value.

The fact it’s free at present makes that question one that can be put off for now, though.