Streaming might work for the NRL – but here’s why fans will lose out

Being an NRL fan in Australia is not only easy, but by and large, cheap.

The sport is a TV product rather than an in-person one, and the price of obtaining access to it is generally very competitive. 

For all the biggest games – Origin, the Grand Final, Test matches – it’s available on free-to-air (FTA) via Channel Nine and, while a Foxtel subscription is $69 (£33) a month, the streaming-only Kayo option is just $25 (£12).

Compared to other countries and other sports, watching the NRL is simple. One channel, one price and they even throw in Super League for free.

Certainly, it’s a lot easier than being a soccer fan. 

If you want to watch the Premier League, you need an Optus subscription ($25 per month), but if you also like the UEFA Champions League, that’s another $27 for Stan Sports – unless it’s Women’s Champions League, in which case you’re looking at $15 extra for Dazn.

If your team gets relegated, so does your subscription, as you’ll need $15 for BeIN Sport for the Championship, though at least you’d get Serie A and the Bundesliga thrown in. 

If, heaven forbid, you’re an Australian who likes Australian soccer, it’s extra $11 for the A-League on Paramount.

All in, it’s $93 (£45) a month to follow global football – with the silver lining that at least the World Cup is still free-to-air on SBS.

No wonder the NRL and AFL – which is also on Foxtel/Kayo – hold such a monopoly on the Australian sporting landscape. 

This run through the lay of the televisual land is worthwhile because, with a new TV deal set to be negotiated, the NRL have been publicly floating the idea that they might siphon off bits of the rights to streaming services alongside the traditional broadcast options.

From a league perspective, this makes sense. 

The SportBusiness Global Media Report estimated a global spend of $100 billion AUD (£48bn) on sports broadcasting in 2024, and it’s only right that the NRL try to increase its slice of that pie.

Baseball exec and sports broadcasting expert Mark Shapiro described the rights as the ‘magic serum’ for broadcasters, an appointment viewing product in an increasingly on-demand world. 

Nine are well aware that literally nothing rates like rugby league: State of Origin topped out at 3.6 million viewers (13% of the entire Australian population), by far the biggest audience of the year. 

The Grand Final and Olympics were next, and only The Block and Married At First Sight are within shouting distance of the NRL from the non-sports world.

Those ratings, however, aren’t enough, and the broadcaster is in a bit of a pickle. 

Nine Entertainment, the holding company which also owns the Sydney Morning Herald and a host of radio stations, saw profits fall 31% last year, 9% of which was on the broadcasting side.

They had a turbulent year with several leadership changes, job cuts at their newspapers and scandals around workplace culture. 

There’s hope that the uplift in viewers will filter through, but at the moment, hope is all it is. If the government were to get serious about banning the ubiquitous gambling adverts, things would go south fast.

In pay TV land, things are no rosier.

Standard Foxtel subscriber numbers have dropped considerably since 2020, when the last TV deal was signed, at a rate of about 10% per year – a phenomenon described in the Australian Financial Review as a ‘streaming apocalypse’. 

Kayo does grow, but a streaming-only customer is worth far less to Foxtel than a traditional one. 

For one, they pay less for the service than legacy consumers, and for two, they tend to turn off their subscription at the end of footy season in October and turn it back on again in March, losing months of revenue over the summer.

Without sports, there is no Foxtel, and without rugby league, Channel Nine would hemorrhage viewers to their rival, Channel Seven, who have AFL signed up long-term. 

This, one would think, would put the NRL in a very strong negotiating position with both parties. 

It’s a far cry from the situation in 2020, when the last deal was inked.

Back then, it was – if you believe Peter V’Landys at least – the NRL that was on the brink of going bust and needed to keep the TV companies onside to survive the pandemic winter.

That’s the reasoning for signing what was, by most metrics, a pretty terrible deal. 

Yes, the game continued, but in doing so, it signed away its product for far less than it was worth, including giving international footy and the NRLW away for free. 

The AFL proved how bad a deal it was by getting a much better settlement out of Foxtel, worth an estimated $100m per year more.

Since then, things have changed. 

V’landys, to his credit, has sat atop the NRL as it has broken most of its previous records for attendances and engagement. Viewers, both on telly and in person, are up. 

It’s a better product to sell in 2025, and with a new team coming from PNG and a second one mooted in the lucrative Perth timeslot, the potential for further growth is there too.

The pandemic-era agreement doesn’t actually expire until 2027, but the NRL want to get the new deal done ahead of time, partly to negotiate from their current position of strength but also because they can read the tea leaves on the trajectory of the industry.

V’Landys can’t just sell the deal, either: he needs to sell big.

While inflation is largely now under control in Australia, the cumulative effects since the deal was signed in 2020 mean that $121 is the new $100. Anything less than a 20% increase is actually a loss in real terms.

The stated aim is $3 billion, which would amount to a 50% rise on the previous deal, but still well behind the $4.5 billion that the AFL got – particularly galling as Aussie Rules lacks an international game or even a State of Origin type of product.

If V’Landys were able to top that, he could legitimately claim to have toppled the AFL as the biggest sport in Australia, cementing untouchable status within rugby league.

The problem will be finding someone to sell to. 

Nine and Foxtel are the long-standing partners, but as mentioned, they aren’t exactly in rude health. If the idea is to create a bidding war, there is a risk that their existing allies might not be able to win.

All this informs why the NRL are looking to split the rights. Streaming services are the ones with the cash, which is rapidly diminishing in traditional media, and it would be silly to overlook such an obvious potential income stream.

Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV are all in the market. Paramount might be, though they also own Network 10, one of the other FTA channels, sp the NRL might opt out of selling to a Nine competitor.

Dazn are both an option for streaming rights and potentially a regular broadcaster too, as they are involved in a deal to buy Foxtel outright that is slated to go through at some point in 2025.

There’s a whole other level of oversight involved there, as Dazn are essentially an outpost of the Saudi regime with huge funding from the oil state’s investment arm, but for the purposes of the NRL, a bidder who has extensive global streaming experience might suit them down to the ground.

In between it all is the great unmentioned: the fans.

American and European readers (or Australians readers who like soccer) will be well aware of how annoying it is to constantly pay different providers to watch your team. 

A Gold Coast Titans supporter currently pays once to watch all their games, but if a streaming diversification deal came in, they’d have to have several subscriptions. 

It doesn’t engender good customer relations to force your consumer to pay multiple times for no extra benefit. What was once a flat $25 fee is now multiple processes costing more money for the same product.

Aussies haven’t had to delve into the world of illegal streaming, as buying the NRL’s product was so cheap and easy, but the harder and more expensive they make it, the more punters will turn to alternative methods.

This is a problem for the NRL that they haven’t had to consider before, and a genie that can’t be put back into the bottle. 

Once fans learn how to pirate, get the hardware and realise how small the chance of being caught is, it’s a struggle to get them back in the habit of paying for content.

Sportsbet, too, might consider what the effect on wagering volumes might be if fans can’t see the game, and clubs might be impacted by potentially lower audiences when they go out to sell sponsorships.

It is estimated that Premier League clubs lose £1m per game in revenue due to illegal streaming, largely through sponsorship eyeballs that they don’t know they have.

These are all considerations going into a major new rights cycle. A short-term financial boost from streaming could help them laud it over the AFL, but the long-term effects on the product and, crucially, its audience are less known.

In other markets, a movement away from legacy broadcasting has disrupted the marketplace in such a way that the audience is now atomised. 

They might be watching live, legally or otherwise, while others might opt to consume solely through social media and highlights packages, if at all.

The certainty is that the current system is very fan friendly, which is in itself a benefit for rugby league in Australia. The ratings and interest levels that have presented the choice to the NRL are proof of this. 

The uncertainty, as ever with these deals, is yet to come.