The TV rights thread

[bobmar28]

He wants to get ride of ONE and replace it with SKY NEWS, what do you think will happen to 10's sports programming? The whole point of ONE was to play all sports through it over the next 2-3years. There seems to be a hidden agenda here and it isn't sport...

So we end up with 2 news and no sports channels.

 

[Tigger Madness]

He's not wrong though.

They're in all the major media markets and have a game that runs longer.

Plus the nature of their game also allows for better advertising placement. Not only can they slip an ad in after every goal, but the advertising time is only 30 seconds which means that the audience is basically captive.

The worth of a sporting product to a TV network is largely based off how much advertising revenue it can produce.

As much as I dislike AFL, if I were an advertiser I would much prefer my ad to run in an AFL game than NRL (assuming viewing numbers were comparable).

 

[applesauce]

So we end up with 2 news and no sports channels.

Exactly. It's a fact everyone is overlooking, thinking he is making some massive play for all of OZ sport. If he was he would keep ONE, it is the perfect format and would guarantee huge channel share if all Tens sport (eg AFL or NRL or Cricket) if it was only played through ONE.

Packer owns Foxsports. He is trying to wipe the FTA sport off the map to get FS ratings and market share up...

 

[Everlovin' Antichrist]

Sometimes people on here talk like they think Gallop is actually trying to get less money into the code :s

No, some people on here are suggesting that Gallop will do what's best for his employer, which is currently NEWS.

Whilst they pay him, he'll do what's best for them, not what's best for the game.

As would anyone in that position.

 

[BunniesMan]

Exactly. It's a fact everyone is overlooking, thinking he is making some massive play for all of OZ sport. If he was he would keep ONE, it is the perfect format and would guarantee huge channel share if all Tens sport (eg AFL or NRL or Cricket) if it was only played through ONE.

Packer owns Foxsports. He is trying to wipe the FTA sport off the map to get FS ratings and market share up...

Let's not get carried away with the conspiracy theories. The first thing packer will do when he gets control is get rid of the stupid 5pm-7.30pm news they want to do at channel 10. He won't wipe out FTA sport, he'll make 10 the capital of FTA sport.

 

[applesauce]

Let's not get carried away with the conspiracy theories. The first thing packer will do when he gets control is get rid of the stupid 5pm-7.30pm news they want to do at channel 10. He won't wipe out FTA sport, he'll make 10 the capital of FTA sport.

Grow up mate and follow the news. :roll: He wants even more news and remove the sport while appealing to an older audience....

Meanwhile, Mr Packer is expected to demand an overhaul of strategy at Ten Network Ltd, which could include scrapping the ONE HD sports channel and outdoor advertising unit, according to media reports.

By the end of trade on Wednesday, Mr Packer had lifted his holding in the television company to 17.88 per cent, which he bought through his private company Consolidated Press Holdings Ltd. He is expected to lift it to 19.9 per cent, the largest individual shareholding possible before being required to launch a takeover bid.

Ten told the Australian Securities Exchange that 163,305,048 shares were bought at $1.50 on Tuesday evening, compared with Ten's last trading price of $1.41. The raid was worth $245 million.

Fairfax Media reports that Mr Packer's new strategic plan for the television station involves using one of Ten's digital channels to screen Sky News, giving it a much larger audience.

By closing the ONE HD sports channel, Mr Packer will also remove a major competitor to the pay television Foxtel sports channels, in which he holds a 25 per cent stake alongside newspaper baron Rupert Murdoch, with Telstra holding the remaining 50 per cent.

The Australian reports that Mr Packer intends to have Ten end its under-performing multi-channel strategy and dump the outdoor advertising division Eye Corp.

It also says Mr Packer wants the station to pay out 100 per cent of profits as dividends as he seeks to return it to low-cost, high margin performance.

He wants Ten to return to being a pure-play free-to-air television station with a focus on the 16-39 year old age group, The Australian said.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au...0---AFR-pd20101021-AEQP9?opendocument&src=rss

Speculation is rife that Mr Packer plans to use his influence as a major shareholder to replace Ten's sports channel One HD with a free-to-air version of Sky News, The Age reported.

Axing the sports channel would remove a competitor to Foxtel, the network partly owned by the media mogul.

http://money.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8110782

 

[BunniesMan]

Grow up mate and follow the news. :roll: He wants even more news and remove the sport while appealing to an older audience....



http://www.businessspectator.com.au...0---AFR-pd20101021-AEQP9?opendocument&src=rss



http://money.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8110782

I never said anything about One HD. I'm well aware of his plans for it. I was talking about sport on the main channel, channel 10 itself. One HD has nothing to do with NRL. He plans on getting rid of channel 10's plans of having 2 and a half hours of straight news content from 5pm onwards, they just hired George Negus amongst others. That plan will probably be killed before it starts.

None of what you have said is relevant to my point that there are rumours he wants to make 10 the fta capital of sport.

With Packer there will be no more One hd, but there will be more sport on 10. The mainstream sports (NRL/AFL etc), not the stuff that was on One.

 

[El Diablo]

ONE HD is the worst rating multi channel. hardly any decent sport on it and another waste of HD

 

[applesauce]

I never said anything about One HD. I'm well aware of his plans for it. I was talking about sport on the main channel, channel 10 itself. One HD has nothing to do with NRL. He plans on getting rid of channel 10's plans of having 2 and a half hours of straight news content from 5pm onwards, they just hired George Negus amongst others. That plan will probably be killed before it starts.

None of what you have said is relevant to my point that there are rumours he wants to make 10 the fta capital of sport.

With Packer there will be no more One hd, but there will be more sport on 10. The mainstream sports (NRL/AFL etc), not the stuff that was on One.

One was made for AFL/NRL/Cricket etc. :lol:

Once the analogue switch over takes place all of Ten's sport would be through ONE...

How can they show the NRL and AFL games on the same time on the same channel (TEN only)???

OneHD and OneSD would be the 2 formats used on a Friday night for example so they could show the NRL and AFL if they ever won the rights to both.

Packer & Murdoch want the main games on FS, simple as that. Murdoch will get his Sky News as a channel while also gaining from the culling of ONE because he has a 25% share in FS.

All this does is limit Tens ability to show sport, as only 1 can be shown at a time. They will need to make up their mind if they want the NRL or AFL or neither, instead of both...

 

[Baron Vo Mandor]

I would prefer 850mill if it means live telecasts NATIONWIDE, fair treatment by the station that holds the rights and an all round appreciation for growing the game across Australia (which is in it's infancy compared to AFL, yet we get comparable ratings which say a lot).

Plus, only if we have a decent IC in place that will utilise the money we have correctly. We can get 2billion but if we piss it up against the wall on hair brained schemes (AFL=GWS) what's the point in the TV rights...

Rightly so networks will pay $100,000,000's but thats to do with the time slots as they choose and rightly so.

 

[Baron Vo Mandor]

So we still have no Saturday FTA game but we have to choose between 2 Sunday games? I don't see how that would work.

Cant afford $15 a week but can afford broadband internet love to know how that works out.

Deadset anyone on here without foxtel and claiming to be a league fan is kidding themselves.

How anyone could prefer Free To Advertise(FTA) Tv coverage over Pay TV is quite simply beyond me.

Bunch of f**king gimps in this thread and nothing else.

 

[Baron Vo Mandor]

id love it

just love it if they had split up stuff.

say, nine puts in 800 million and gets all the season games>

however. 7 buys SOO for 100 million a game.

finals go for about the same price?

genius.

SOLID GOLD! :lol: BWAHAHAHAHA!

 

[BunniesMan]

One was made for AFL/NRL/Cricket etc. :lol:

Once the analogue switch over takes place all of Ten's sport would be through ONE...

How can they show the NRL and AFL games on the same time on the same channel (TEN only)???

OneHD and OneSD would be the 2 formats used on a Friday night for example so they could show the NRL and AFL if they ever won the rights to both.

Packer & Murdoch want the main games on FS, simple as that. Murdoch will get his Sky News as a channel while also gaining from the culling of ONE because he has a 25% share in FS.

All this does is limit Tens ability to show sport, as only 1 can be shown at a time. They will need to make up their mind if they want the NRL or AFL or neither, instead of both...

Noone is saying Ten is aiming for all of NRL and AFL. The most likely scenario is they get a split of both and show 3 games of each on fta. If FNF stays the same, they could have that 1 QLD and 1 NSW game like we've had till now, and 1 Sunday game on FTA, add 2 AFL games on the saturday and a third on sunday.

There's plenty of room for both as AFL will probably be shared with 7, and NRL will be shared with Foxtel.

 

[Perth Red]

Cant afford $15 a week but can afford broadband internet love to know how that works out.

Deadset anyone on here without foxtel and claiming to be a league fan is kidding themselves.

How anyone could prefer Free To Advertise(FTA) Tv coverage over Pay TV is quite simply beyond me.

Bunch of f**king gimps in this thread and nothing else.

AS a RL fan out West Fox is a life saver and worth every cent. But its the casual sports fan that misses out when NRL is not shown nationally at a decent time. Its very hard to build a following for a sport, get kids interested in playing it etc if its not on TV. 70%+ of homes don't have Foxsports

 

[bobmar28]

Cant afford $15 a week but can afford broadband internet love to know how that works out.

Deadset anyone on here without foxtel and claiming to be a league fan is kidding themselves.

How anyone could prefer Free To Advertise(FTA) Tv coverage over Pay TV is quite simply beyond me.

Bunch of f**king gimps in this thread and nothing else.

Do you have shares in Foxtel?

 

[El Diablo]

http://www.smh.com.au/business/afl-rights-could-be-block-to-packer-20101022-16xw0.html

AFL rights could be block to Packer
Ben Butler and Adele Ferguson
October 23, 2010

JAMES Packer's $245 million raid on the Ten Network may be blocked because it would reduce competition for AFL broadcast rights.

And because two key shareholders have thrown their weight behind the casino king's plans to shake up the TV network, his 17.88 per cent stake will be treated as a controlling interest in a review by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel told The Age the commission had already begun looking into Mr Packer's raid and would write to him and the other two biggest shareholders, WIN TV owner Bruce Gordon and investment group Perpetual.

A major issue is the 25 per cent stake in Ten's rival Foxtel, controlled by Mr Packer's Consolidated Media.

''There is speculation this [the Packer raid] might reduce the competition for bidding for NRL, or not so much NRL as AFL, because Ten One HD is a participant in that exercise, as is Fox Sport. There's all sorts of things,'' said Mr Samuel, a former AFL commissioner.

TV rights are the AFL's main source of revenue. Current arrangements expire next year and the next deal is tipped to bring in more than $1 billion a year.

Mr Samuel said the ACCC would also consider the impending announcement by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy of a new anti-siphoning list of events that should be kept on free-to-air TV.

''They're all factors that we have to take into account, but we'll deal with that,'' Mr Samuel said.

If the ACCC decided Mr Packer's stake reduced competition it could ask a court to order the sale of the shares under section 50 of the Trade Practices Act.

Yesterday's intervention by one of Australia's most powerful regulators came as Mr Gordon spent more than $900,000 topping up his Ten stake from 11.96 per cent to 13 per cent.

Mr Gordon and Perpetual's head of Australian equities, John Sevior, have publicly supported Mr Packer's plunge into Ten and his cost-cutting plans for the broadcaster.

Those plans reportedly include canning sports channel One in favour of a Sky News feed from Foxtel and offloading outdoor advertising business Eye.

Mr Packer also would not go ahead with a recently announced nightly news and current affairs show fronted by veteran broadcaster George Negus, it has been reported.

In the past, Mr Samuel said, some people had regarded a stake of less than 20 per cent as ''only a minority interest''. ''We don't look at it that way because … 19.9 plus someone else's 12 plus someone else's 9 can take you up to close to 40-odd per cent and that gives you control of the board.

''It's controlling influence over a company's affairs that's far more important.''

The ACCC would conduct its review on the ''hypothetical assumption'' a combination of shareholders might vote together to control Ten, he said.

''Already there's speculation in this morning's paper - I think there's even comments from WIN Group, Bruce Gordon, and Perpetual … which says yes we support Packer.

''So already you've got, I think, if my calculations are correct, just under 20 plus about 9 per cent of Perpetual plus about 12 per cent of WIN. ''What's that give you? You've got control and you could change the whole board if you wanted.''

Mr Gordon's son, Andrew, who is executive chairman of WIN, could not be reached.

Mr Sevior said Perpetual was a passive investor in Ten and sold part of its shareholding to Mr Packer because it lacked operational expertise.

''We are interested in how Ten's profit and loss can be improved. The costs are too high, so if someone has a better idea than existing management and had some past success in the industry that represents an alternative game plan,'' he said.

 

[El Diablo]

''There is speculation this [the Packer raid] might reduce the competition for bidding for NRL, or not so much NRL as AFL, because Ten One HD is a participant in that exercise, as is Fox Sport. There's all sorts of things,'' said Mr Samuel, a former AFL commissioner.

i hope so

 

[fourplay]

http://www.smh.com.au/sport/packers...xcept-the-viewers-that-is-20101022-16xux.html

Packer's swoop on Ten brings good news for everyone - except the viewers, that is.


Roy Masters

October 23, 2010

JAMES Packer's purchase of the largest single shareholding in Channel Ten is bad news for Australia's two biggest football codes and their fans but good news for his media mates.

If Packer shuts down Ten's digital sports channel, One HD, it effectively eliminates one of the reforms the Minister for Communications, Stephen Conroy, planned in his forthcoming changes to the anti-siphoning list, allowing fans of NRL and AFL in the ''developing states'' to watch games live on digital channels.

The AFL is desperate for fans in NSW and Queensland to watch games on free-to-air TV, rather than pay TV, which is available in only 30 per cent of households, particularly with the code's massive investment in two new teams, the Gold Coast Suns and Greater Western Sydney.

Senator Conroy's amendments to the anti-siphoning list would have meant AFL fans in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania could watch games on a free-to-air network's primary channel, while its digital channel would carry the games north.
Similarly, the NRL, frustrated by Nine's after-midnight coverage of rugby league matches in Victoria, hoped the successful free-to-air bidder for rugby league rights would show games live in NSW and Queensland on its primary channel, while the digital channel would simultaneously carry them south.

AFL fans in NSW and Queensland are forced to subscribe to Foxtel to watch Seven's big Friday night and Sunday games, while Nine won't allow Foxtel to show its NRL games until after they have aired.

If Packer closes One HD, it effectively eliminates Ten as a bidder for NRL rights, given that it doesn't want to suffer the financial hurt of showing low-rating rugby league in prime time in Victoria on its primary channel, in the same way it already suffers with poor audience figures televising AFL into Sydney and Brisbane on Saturdays.

NRL chief executive David Gallop will be disappointed with the possible closure of One HD, given that he met Ten executive chairman Nick Falloon and his lieutenant Grant Blackley recently and welcomed the network as a bidder for NRL rights.

The closure of the high-cost, low-return One HD would drive fans back to Foxtel, where Packer's Consolidated Media Holdings owns a quarter stake, while eliminating a rival to Fox Sports, half-owned by CMH.

Foxtel, owner of AFL pay TV rights which expire at the end of next year, and Fox Sports, owner of the NRL rights, which expire a year later, are two of Packer's most lucrative assets. They will become even more valuable if Telstra, half owner of Foxtel, is forced to sell out.

Packer's $280 million outlay for 18 per cent of Ten, plus board seats and influence over the network's direction, is small change compared with the protection of his potential billion-dollar pay TV properties.

The purchase of a stake in a free-to-air network also enhances his gambling opportunities, should internet betting on live sport be allowed.

Seven and Nine also have digital channels, meaning they could use them to screen AFL and NRL to the ''developing'' states but their existing programming is directed to a non-sports demographic.

News Ltd, quarter owner of Foxtel and the other half-owner of Fox Sports, also gains from Packer's closure of One HD because it enhances the value of its assets.

News Ltd's imminent exit from half-ownership of the NRL will clear one of the barriers to News Ltd increasing its stake in Foxtel, should Telstra sell out. Similarly, Kerry Stokes, who has a quarter share of Packer's CMH while being a part-owner of Channel Seven, gains.
His equity in Foxtel and Fox Sports is now worth more, while Seven has one less rival if it bids for the NRL.

Seven and Ten are contractually bound to bid for AFL together. One can't bid without the other. They onsell four games a week to Foxtel but further changes to the anti-siphoning list will allow Foxtel to bid directly for some games.

News Ltd and Packer, through their ownership of Foxtel and Fox Sports, now have a mesh with Ten in bidding for AFL rights and might be able to extract a better deal from Seven.

News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch arrives in Australia in a week's time, and his executives will be keen to deliver good news.
The ARL, his old enemy from the Super League war, will be disbanded at its annual general meeting on December 7, and their chief backer during the conflict - the Packer family - have now enhanced the value of their pay TV assets.

Furthermore, Senator Conroy, who has a toxic relationship with News, has been frustrated in his attempts to deliver more sport to free-to-air TV.

 

[beercoaster]

Cant afford $15 a week but can afford broadband internet love to know how that works out.

Deadset anyone on here without foxtel and claiming to be a league fan is kidding themselves.

How anyone could prefer Free To Advertise(FTA) Tv coverage over Pay TV is quite simply beyond me.

Bunch of f**king gimps in this thread and nothing else.

Spot on.

 

[Timmah]

I might be in a minority here (just a wild guess...) but I honestly reckon it'd be better off sticking with Nine. Most people are comfortable with the commentary, it's familiar and their camerawork etc is still second to none. Remember that if we end up on other channels we may end up with other, far more painful commentators... and who knows how those channels might treat NRL... there's no guarantees they'll televise games at appropriate times or even on their primary channels...