Talk surrounding the next AFL broadcasting deal is heating up, with reports in The Age suggesting we are likely to see more games behind a paywall from 2025.
Whether this is via Fox Footy or one of the prospective networks chasing the rights in Channel 10/Paramount or Channel 9/Stan, it would be a big shift for viewers.
Andy Maher believes Paramount, owners of the CBS Network in the United States, have rolled out the NFL big guns in order to impress the AFL.
“The industry scuttlebutt for what it’s worth is this … and it could be wrong,” Maher said on SEN’s The Run Home.
“But the industry scuttlebutt is that Paramount, if they want, could seriously, seriously reach beyond whatever the incumbents (Channel 7 and Fox Footy) can come up.
“You’ve got to remember this is CBS, this is a huge international (network).
“And do you know who they had as part of their pitch, their video pitch that was put to the AFL? Jim Nantz and Tony Romo were part of the video pitch … ‘Hi everyone over there in Australia. This is what we bring as a television sports broadcasting firm’.”
Australian basketball great Andrew Gaze hopes that the AFL never puts its product entirely behind a paywall, like the English Premier League.
“It would be a horrific day, and thank god there’s rules and regulations around it, and a blight on the sport if we went down that model (with no free to air footy),” Gaze added.
Maher believes the AFL couldn’t afford to make such a change, given how many Australians would be locked out of the product.
“When you’ve only got about 30 per cent market penetration (of pay TV subscribers), you can’t do it. You can’t make your product available to only 30 per cent of the population. You just cannot do it. That’s suicide,” he said.
“We’re a million miles away from that ever being the case.”
The Age report goes on to say that some games in Western Australia and South Australia could also go behind a paywall in the next broadcast deal.
These markets have been kept on free-to-air traditionally.