I don’t know how RA convinces anyone to pay that much money let alone more. Even Bledisloe games ratings are absolutely f**king pathetic. If you’re not getting the World Cup you’re getting some badly rating Wallabies games and super rugby matches that rate about as well as test patterns.
I guess these companies need to have a certain amount of content but I can’t see how they’d be keen to pay too much. Doesn’t help that rugby on this country is rapidly going backwards in terms of so crowds, ratings and even number of teams. How confident are the TV networks that super rugby will even be able to commit to all their teams surviving considering their massive debt and their Melbourne team being culled?
It was explained by STAN when they originally got the rights that the Rugby audience tend to be high income earners, therefore they are happy to pay the $25 for Stan Sport and they set and forget, paying the $25 forever more. Thier advertisers are also higher spenders, Rolex, Lexus …etc
Its in Stan’s best interest to make sure Super Rugby is as strong as possible, if that means throwing them an extra 10m to resign their top players and keep them in Australia then Stan will do it.
It will be interesting to see if Fox are interested to regain the rights, it’ll come down to how many subscribers they lost when they lost the rights and if they thinks it worth trying to get them back.
