The head of Foxtel says AFL fans will “run towards the light” this season and subscribe to its pay TV service or sports streaming platform Kayo when they realise much of the season’s live Saturday coverage has gone behind a paywall.
A new AFL broadcast agreement with Fox Sports and Channel Seven kicks in this season. Kayo Sports or Foxtel will be required to watch live AFL on a Saturday in Victoria and Tasmania for every round of the home-and-away season, and nationally for the first eight rounds.
Patrick Delany believes Australians “see as normal paying for content these days” and the new exclusive live Saturday AFL matches on the pay-TV provider will be enough convince them to sign up with a subscription platform.
“Sport is nothing unless it’s live. 90% of all viewership on Kayo is live sport, so that’s the beginning and ending,” he said. “If you’re not live, you’re not in the game, and $25 a month is so cheap for a family to be entertained, so I think it’s one of those moments where Australians will run towards the light.”
Kayo has kept its basic plan at $25 per month since its launch seven years ago although its premium tier – offering streaming on two simultaneous devices and 4K picture quality – will increase in price from $35 to $40 in March.
This season Foxtel will also use its own AFL commentators for every match of each round, rather than taking the Seven feed for matches it shares with the free-to-air broadcaster.
Seven has been promoting its new rights deal which allows matches it screens via TV aerials to also be streamed on 7plus and a Saturday focus on state footy including the WAFL, SANFL and prime time VFL as part of a push for new footy content every day of the week.
Seven’s Saturday matches last year consistently averaged an audience of half a million viewers according to ratings provider Voz, and were regularly Australia’s highest-rating Saturday program.
The start of the new seven-year, $4.5bn AFL rights agreement comes as competition in streaming is increasing. Disney+ will begin to offer ESPN – also available on Foxtel and Kayo – in coming weeks, and Amazon and Netflix appear to be increasing their appetite for sporting properties.
Delany said ESPN and its American codes represent “a great offering of sport, but they’re very minor sports in Australia, and they skew mainly to summer”. He said adding them to Disney+ is not unlike Foxtel’s decision to add live AFL and NRL to subscribers of Binge, Foxtel’s streaming platform with news and entertainment.
The Fox Footy team have been working internally on the transition to the new rights arrangement since June, and Delany said he had collaborated with the AFL on a fixture which would assist in driving subscriptions.
“With the line-up of sports rights shifting and the way in which we do things, we always see change as great opportunity for growth,” he said. “You want the subscribers to stay longer and to be better engaged, and we just see this as a golden era of sports streaming.”
Despite Seven’s move into the streaming space this year, Delany said the network’s new digital AFL rights won’t affect Foxtel and Kayo subscriber numbers. “Our kids are not watching free-to-air TV, they’re watching YouTube and Tiktok. The world’s moved on, and I think the network should have moved quicker to digital,” he said.
“In terms of how it affects us, Nine has had digital NRL rights forever [since 2018], it doesn’t affect us and our growth. What affects what people want to watch is being able to see every game live, 4K, great commentary, and now the exclusivity of Saturday and other games.”
Foxtel is awaiting ACCC and FIRB approval on a takeover by Saudi Arabia-backed streaming company Dazn. Delany said he hoped it could be resolved before the government went into caretaker mode ahead of the coming federal election, but he was excited about the global opportunities for Australian sport.
“To date, we’ve had to convince people like Sky and ESPN, can you do us a favour and put it on,” he said. “Dazn are in 200 countries, this is one of those moments where we can really march forward and represent Australian sports very, very well.”
