The NRL will consider bringing broadcast production of its matches in-house ahead of the next television deal to entice streaming services to bid for the rights.
The governing body will start negotiations with potential media partners once it has made a definitive call on the number of teams in the competition. PNG will enter the league in 2028, while there remains the prospect of another franchise – most likely in Perth – coming in a year earlier.
Negotiations with the Western Australian government will recommence now that Roger Cook has been reappointed as premier, with a decision on the region expected within two months.
While the existing broadcast deal between Foxtel and Nine Entertainment – the publishers of this masthead – doesn’t expire until 2027, the NRL wants to get to the table early to consider all the options in an increasingly fragmented media market.
Sports rights are becoming valuable to streaming services – such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Google and Apple – but they usually prefer a clean feed to be provided rather than having to produce the content themselves.
It’s one of the reasons the NRL is considering bringing production of its rugby league content in-house.
“That is definitely an option,” ARLC chairman Peter V’landys said. “We have to consider it because some of the other streamers require us to provide them a clean feed. The ones we spoke to last time around, we would have had to do production.
The NRL will consider bringing broadcast production in-house.Credit: NRL Photos
“It will be the same quality as what we get now, that’s the thing. With technology, you can add things. If you have your own equipment, you can reinvest and keep up with the technology. There’s robotic cameras, there’s AI.”
Under the leadership of V’landys, Racing NSW paid a reported $5 million for production equipment to Global Advance, which had gone bust after previously broadcasting A-League matches. However, the NRL would likely purchase its own equipment if it decided to bring production in-house rather than lease from elsewhere.
The issue of traditional media – in the form of free-to-air and pay-TV – coming under pressure from streaming services was a topic of conversation at a recent NRL business of sport conference in Las Vegas. Keynote speaker David Nathanson of Mapleton Investments – who acquired the American rights to the NRL while at Fox Sports – said “the television and pay TV business in the United States is in a state of irreversible decline”.
“The aggregate programming fees, the fees that distributors are paying networks for their rights, is not keeping up with the pace of decline,” Nathanson said.
“That is leading us to this state of irreversible change in the US television market.
“Sports are unquestionably the most coveted assets for traditional media companies. Why? It’s the only thing keeping their audiences connected with their pay-TV universe and the old model. Entertainment content has already left the building. They’re gone, they’ve already gone to the streaming platforms. Sports will turn off the lights.”
Nathanson pointed to Netflix having 89 million subscribers in the US, at a time when the number of pay-TV subscribers was just 67 million. He added that streamers were keen to acquire sporting content given 80 per cent of the most-watched programs in America were sports related, a number that would have been higher still if not for the US election.
He said content entrants such as Apple were well placed to jockey for sporting content given that globally there are 2.2 billion active Apple devices, including phones and computers.
“You have an apex predator on the horizon, one that is acquiring content selectively with a significantly better mousetrap than that model that has been created by the traditional providers, and those are the streamers,” Nathanson said.
“They are better at hunting for subscribers and monetising these rights than any of the traditional players.”
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