The inside story on how Seven and Foxtel held Cricket Australia’s broadcast rights

By joining Foxtel after a five-year stint in which it split the Big Bash League and international cricket between ten and nine, CA effectively reduced the number of networks it could negotiate with.

Why? Of the three commercial FTA networks so vital to ensuring the widest possible Australian audience can see major sport, only Seven has not launched its own pay-per-view streaming service to compete with Foxtel.

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Nine has the rights to the NRL in a shared multi-discipline deal with Foxtel, but the priority now is for content to be bought and run across the linear and streaming wings of one unit. Ten and Paramount have similar goals.

Seven, of course, complained long and loud that they didn’t get enough halo effect from their cricket rights in the first two years of the deal. But it’s often forgotten that Foxtel wasn’t completely enamored either: industry sources, speaking openly on condition of anonymity, have recalled how chief executive Patrick Delany stated more than once in 2019 that cricket has not worked for Foxtel or Kayo.

However, CA found a very useful ally in the Foxtel relationship when it appointed a new board member later that year. Former Foxtel CEO Richard Freudenstein was not only a seasoned media player, but also a hired head of the News Corps REA Group and a supportive back channel for Foxtel and News Corp as the crisis continued. When COVID-19 hit the following year, Sevens’ heated argument and use of the courts was in stark contrast to Foxs’ calm.

After coming out of the pandemic together in peace and watching Kayo steadily grow into Australia’s most trusted sports streaming product, CA and Foxtel likely never parted ways. The relationship of interdependence was highlighted by how, in a new deal announced this week, Foxtel paid all of the extra money, around $30m a year, to keep exclusive rights to men’s whiteball matches.

Ten-Paramount clapper, seven strikes

Even so, CA needed to create some form of competition in the market if cricket operators were to get anything even remotely close to the massive increases that have come from every broadcast contract since 1994.

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CA courted Ten and Paramount in 2022, leading to an opening bid of $1.5 billion for the chance to take everything from Foxtel and Seven. While CA chief executive Nick Hockley was keen to suggest that the incumbents had also been the highest bidders when it reached $1.512bn, sources close to Ten and Paramount made it clear that their original figure had been just that – much more could easily have been to be a table.

Numerous senior figures in CA were weary and wary of the Seven. At a more physical stage in December 2020, the online campaign featured private conversations between Martin and CA commercial director Steph Beltrame and other senior figures Peter Roach and Alistair Dobson. This breach of trust as part of the Sevens Court action has remained a sore point ever since.

But Paramount gave Seven and Foxtel a chance to do a deal on their terms by announcing in mid-December that it wanted to suspend talks after the Christmas and New Year break. With dozens of questions about audience reach, negative user feedback on Paramount streaming, and real dealings with US executives instead of domestic bosses, CA had enough reason to be suspicious.

Meanwhile, CA executives and managers did not go as far as the AFL in making a highly publicized visit to the US to meet Paramounts heavy-hitters in person. And with no real chance of CA walking away from Foxtel, the only discussions left to take place were conflicting ones.

The Olympics are changing hands

Neither Ten nor Nine were interested in playing the role of Seven alongside Foxtel. The preference for networks other than Seven is to own the sport outright, the better to split it between FTA and streaming.

Four weeks after the Stokes and Goyder cocktail party in Perth, the Nines’ decision to pay $300 million to wrest the Olympics from its traditional home of Sevens was another example of this strategy. Warburton presented this in an email to all staff as a decision to free the network from its long axis with the IOC.

This left Seven as the only network with both the money and the strategic desire to buy back cricket alongside Foxtel. With the nine pot done elsewhere and Paramount not only teasing the ball but also on holidays, CA was left to make the only decision it could make, to keep its incumbents at an annual fee of $216 million vs. $197 million. covers inflation.

As in 2018, the ramifications of CA’s decision won’t be fully known until the new deal has gone much further. The terms five years ago, signed amid the hype of the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, created a period of enormous instability at the hands of the Sevens’ power brokers.

This time, a minimal increase in the value of the rights to Foxtel and Seven on favorable terms may be known as the deal that pushed CA’s privatization into the great unknown.