Sport off free TV? Tell ’em they’re streaming

Let’s talk national campfires, Pat Cummins steaming in from the Randwick end, the pinstripe mob that runs this joint, and the redoubtable Senator Sarah Hanson Young.

See, in the beginning, there were lots of national campfires where, as a people, we would regularly gather to clap our hands and warm our souls. Watching the same huge sporting event was one of them. There have been few more unifying national moments in my lifetime than whenAnnually, the Boxing Day Test, various World Cup finals, football grand finals, Ashes Tests, Wimbledon finals, Melbourne Cups are other examples, while the Olympics are a quadrennial national delight.

For as Australians, we all knew our birthrights included: fresh air, clean water, lots of sunshine AND, most crucially, watching every ball of our mob destroying England at Lord’s, without having to pay for the privilege. But in the mid-90s pay TV companies arrived, where the idea was that they could buy up the rights to broadcast certain sports, and the only way you could watch them was if you paid a certain amount per month.

Rather, free-to-air networks like Channel Nine - owners of this masthead - had to have first rights to broadcast them. Over the decades since, that anti-siphoning legislation has been progressively updated as ever more sport ended up on pay TV.The big advent in recent times has been the ability to stream free-to-air channels over the internet.

Without those amendments, he says, the danger is that sports really will sell their rights only to paying services, and deny the digital rights to Channel Nineantennae, that could watch, say, the NRL grand final. This would diminish the audience for free-to-air networks right now by as much as a third – and growing – and lessen the amount the networks could pay for the rights. In the end, they would inevitably not be able to compete and stop broadcasting sport on free-to-air networks.this week.

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