Looks like cricket might not have a FTA competitive bidding process http://www.theage.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/channel-nine-urged-to-step-away-from-the-cricket-contract-by-analysts-20170425-gvruzl.htmlNine lose 40 million a year showing it and the bean counters are saying enough is enough.

The 'quality' of the product is virtually unimportant. It's the popularity of the product that is important. If you look at the big bash cricket, from a quality perspective it's inferior to the Indian Premier League or the defunct Champions League Twenty/20, which both pay higher salaries and attract more higher rated players and teams. If you look at the AFL the spectator product is nowhere near as attractive as it was 20 years ago (from what I hear in the media, and my own perspective from watching a few matches in the last few years and having watched regularly 20-30 years ago). Yet both those sports are rating their socks off. 

Better players and a higher standard of match play doesn't necessarily equal higher ratings. It's the popularity of the sport that drives ratings. Higher ratings are driven mostly by hype, marketing, cross promotion etc. which leads to people starting to follow a team and then those team allegiances also increase ratings.

I agree that putting on the Saturday night derby games and showing off the crowd atmosphere will increase interest in the league overall and this must be done in the FTA deal.

With Football, there's just too much competition for anyone outside of Australia to ever have enough interest to actually pay money for rights.

^^^^^
Further to the cricket / UBS valuation. Goes to show outside AFL & NRL media deals are difficult, my understanding was the last Super Rugby deal the Australian amount paid was about 20% down on what Fox had paid previously.

Ten's market capital value has fallen to 170 million with a loss expected to be announced this week.

Maybe its time to consider a stream alternative to TV. 

The cricket deal is difficult because cricket Australia has made it so. At one point in time test cricket was the backbone of Channel nine. I know from reading interviews with Kerry Packer on the subject that he would do everything possible to keep test cricket on channel nine, at all costs. This is no longer the case and that is partly because cricket Australia has bastardized cricket with different forms of the game. The first transformation was with World Series of Cricket and the next was with T/20 cricket. 
The simple fact of the matter is that T/20 is becoming more popular than test cricket. There is simply no appetite for test cricket. Not to the tune of losing 40M  a year on securing the rights. Luckily for cricket they will ride the T/20 gravy train for a while and this is where they will make their money from in future. 

They already do pay for rights. Not big but it happens.

We also have things like ACL - for example Brisbane Roar's ACL play off had a larger world wide audience (outside of Aus) than the AFL grand Final

I maybe proven to be incorrect, but my gut tells me BBL will struggle to hold its existing audience share over time as its too much of the same.

The simple fact of the matter is that T/20 is becoming more popular than test cricket. There is simply no appetite for test cricket. 

Looks like cricket might not have a FTA competitive bidding process http://www.theage.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/channel-nine-urged-to-step-away-from-the-cricket-contract-by-analysts-20170425-gvruzl.htmlNine lose 40 million a year showing it and the bean counters are saying enough is enough.

no wonder the value of FTA channels are dropping when you have trash such as "I'm a celebrity get me out here" and "marriage at first sight." even the AFL was put on 7mate the other night in Melbourne because of a cooking show. that's unprecedented. 

and it lost to the AFL game on 7mate in Melbourne. Lesson learnt i think.

Maybe they made a national decision for the sake of their advertisers.I am guessing the cooking show rated higher across the country than the AFL did. 

They are usually prepared to mix the channels up for AFL.  Perth generally has games on 7mate when its main channel elsewhere due to time difference.

I agree that popularity is everything. As I have often said, its the 80/20 rule

The majority of the interest in our game will be driven by 20% of the game. This is the big teams, big players and derbies

The FFA spend too much resources trying to keep people interested in a round 25 or 26 Sunday afternoon game. 70% of the best players aren't in the top 3 teams

When the FFA cap quality, they drive the value of the big teams downwards. You can pretty much rule out SFC or MV winning a title next season. What does that do for the popularity of the league?

Interesting that the AFL's big war marketing hoo haa game yesterday had 549,000 melbourne metro watching but just the 42,000 in sydney and just 38,000 in brisbane - and on main channels with massive publicity. More people outside of Melbourne watched Mash repeats, Octonauts and Peter Rabbit on channel 2. 

Hah!
I love how you agree with him, especially this nugget of information:

 

Higher ratings are driven mostly by hype, marketing, cross promotion etc. which leads to people starting to follow a team and then those team allegiances also increase ratings.

Now maybe you realise how vital it is/was for our game to be on a big FTA channel rather than SBS. Previously I made the point absolutely crystal clear as to the importance of cross promotion, larger marketing budgets and the ability to get the game front and centre of so may more people rather than hidden away on small channels like SBS 2.

You know if the FFA put all their energy into engaging and targeting actual football fans rather than trying to be bigger than the AFL and NRL we wouldn't be in this situation. Always said there is enough football fans in Australia to make it work. There are so many football people that have little to no interest in the A-League and the FFA have tried to go for the AFL and NRL fans instead. 

Will ABC do stupid half time interviews tho

Could set it up like Rage does and instead of musicians/bands have HAL players pop up in their club shirts with a pre recorded introduction to the show thats on next. 

"Hey kids its Bruno Fornaroli from Melbourne City FC. Up next is Play School... Now get fucked!"