Nine wants to be a player on AFL game days
Caroline Wilson | May 6, 2009
THE Nine Network last night revealed its ambition to officially return to the AFL broadcast landscape and confirmed its plans to bid for the football rights beyond 2011.
Despite speculation the next round of broadcast rights - Australia's richest sporting TV deal - was in danger of becoming a one-horse race in free-to-air terms, network boss Jeff Browne told The Age: "Of course we're interested.
"Channel Nine would always be interested in talking to the AFL about their product. We enjoyed having football in the past and we did a very good job with it."
It is understood AFL boss Andrew Demetriou and his deputy, Gillon McLachlan, have completed their first unofficial round of visits to all television networks, including Channel Nine, in a bid to clarify the TV football landscape beyond 2011.
Demetriou has told the networks they would be delivered a more definite scenario of how the home-and away-season would work in broadcast terms should the competition continue to boast eight games a week as part of a 17-team competition in which each club would have two byes in a season. The networks will also be given a clearer picture of how a nine-game round would work should western Sydney have entered the competition by 2012, the first year of a new rights deal.
While manoeuvring has already begun for the significantly less-lucrative radio rights beyond 2009, Channels Seven, Ten and Foxtel have paid a total $780 million to secure the broadcast rights until the end of 2011.
Channels Seven and Ten are believed to have officially committed to bid together next time around as part of a contract signed by the two networks, which could see Nine taking on its two commercial free-to-air rivals.
Nine would appear more likely to team up with Fox Sports given that the pair have already joined forces to purchase the rights for the 2012 London Olympic Games, but that decision has not been made with Foxtel still waiting on Federal Government's moves as far as its pay-TV restrictions are concerned. Currently under the anti-siphoning agreement Foxtel cannot bid in its own right for the AFL's product and under the current agreement purchased its weekly offering of four home-and-away games from Seven and Ten. But that network is pushing for more direct access to more content.
Browne last night pointed out Nine's ongoing commitment to the AFL via the game's long running The Footy Show, the highest rating non-match day AFL program along with the Sunday Footy Show, Monday night's Footy Classified and Nine's latest AFL offering TAC Future Stars to be launched on Sunday.
"I think as a non-rights holder we have continued to demonstrate our commitment to AFL football and we will continue to do so," Browne said.
Negotiations are expected to move to the next stage later this year with no network discounting completely the possibility of all three commercial stations having some AFL product.
