The Breakers are just the latest team to find a free-to-air home. What’s driving the reversal of a 30-year trend?

For decades, New Zealand has been a global outlier when it comes to big time sports. With a few exceptions – the occasional America’s Cup, Olympics or Rugby World Cup, some basketball on Whakaata Māori – you had to pay to see your favourite athletes. The vast majority of New Zealand’s major competitions were on Sky, a situation which held until Spark Sport grabbed the domestic cricket rights in 2019. Even then, it was still a paywall – in fact, cricket fans had to pay twice, as Sky still mostly retained rights to New Zealand cricket teams when they played overseas.

Regular free-to-air sports was a backwater – some motorsports on a Sunday afternoon, or delayed coverage on Sky’s neglected Prime channel. That situation held for years, with sports entering a kind of Faustian pact. They would take the big cheques offered by Sky, and later Spark, while accepting a smaller and older audience than they might have had with a different distribution strategy. Sky’s revenues and therefore the scale of those payments lasted for decades – until, like pay TV operators the world over, it started to find retaining customers hard, and onboarding new ones harder.

Local sports as a paywalled service lasted until December 2022, when Spark decided to quit sports streaming. It struck a deal with TVNZ to take over its deals, starting July 1, 2023. This came as a shock to our sporting system, and created an unplanned experiment: what happened when free-to-air got a big bang of sports rights, after decades away? A little over a year on, we’re starting to have an answer – and a sense of where the brave new world of sports streaming might be headed, for better and for worse.

We’re playing a different game

It’s worth stepping back and looking at other countries in the Anglosphere, other English-speaking countries to which we often compare ourselves. In the UK, the BBC airs a wide variety of cricket, football, rugby and tennis, while ITV has further complementary packages, including the likes of the Rugby World Cups and Tours de France. 

Australia has anti-siphoning legislation that ensures a wide variety of sport is broadcast live and free-to-air, including key matches across cricket, Aussie rules, rugby league, the Olympics, tennis and netball. The big four US sports have consistently sliced up their packages to ensure coverage exists across multiple free-to-air networks, and Canada has multiple sports across national and regional free-to-air broadcasters.

Thus New Zealand was out on its own with such a thin lineup of free-to-air sports. We can’t run a control group to see what the last couple of decades would have been like without the paywall, but the general consensus is:

• Attendance at live games suffered.
• Audiences on television eventually did too (Sky maxed out at a little over half of New Zealand households).
• Participation flatlined in some major traditional sports (you’re less likely to play if you can’t see the game).
• The sports organisations’ digital transformation atrophied, as they failed to develop direct-to-consumer databases and skill sets.
• Commercial revenue probably declined over time, in part due to lower ratings and attendance.

This was foreseen, and discussed. But you can’t necessarily blame anyone. The sports organisations were taking large, stable, guaranteed revenue. And Sky was using its leverage and revenues to create as big and attractive a bundle of nowhere-else sports, keeping its audience as large and engaged as possible.

Two roundball deals reveal the new landscape

In May, Netball New Zealand announced a new deal for 2025 which was strikingly different to its previous broadcast approach. Historically Sky had paid it for exclusive rights to cover its games, which included producing coverage and providing commentary. From next year, Netball NZ will contract a third party to shoot and call its games, with TVNZ airing them live, while Sky runs a delayed package on Saturdays. Then, last week, TVNZ announced rights to screen Breakers games.

The financial terms weren’t disclosed, but given the well-canvassed losses TVNZ has endured this year, it’s unlikely to have paid much for those packages. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that it did not pay anything at all. They join the America’s Cup – streaming on both Stuff and ThreeNow – as marquee sports returning from exclusive pay TV deals to a greater degree of free public access.

Why would sports franchises and organisations take on the cost of broadcasting, or give away their rights? It goes back to those bullet points listed above. We live in a winner-take-most media era, and one with intense fragmentation of interest and international competition. Sports fans can gorge on YouTube and TikTok highlights packages, many of which exist as a gateway to direct-to-consumer subscriptions to packages from the likes of the UFC, NBA and other leagues. 

It’s great for broadcasters, as live sports retain a rare power to compel linear viewing. It’s also an interesting alternate route for local sports rights holders – income from sponsors can be more lucrative than that derived from increasingly thin rights deals if they can point to larger free-to-air audiences across linear and streaming. As for Sky, it’s got more data than ever about which sports truly drive subscriptions, and is now operating in an environment with no scale subscription alternative for codes. It’s telling that both netball and NBL (including the Breakers, on ESPN) will still screen on Sky Sports – so it can tell its subscribers that nothing has changed, all while saving significant costs.

The biggest deal of them all

All this sets up for the most intriguing sports rights round in some time. NZ Rugby has one more full year to run with its last Sky deal, signed in 2019. Back then, Spark Sport was very much in the room, and NZ Rugby leveraged the situation adroitly, commanding not just a vast sum, but also a 5% stake in Sky itself. 

Since then, the situation has radically changed. Spark wants no part of sports rights, while Warner Bros Discovery and TVNZ could never contemplate matching the vast cashflow Sky can point at rugby. When Silverlake concluded its marathon efforts to invest in NZ Rugby, it did so with the expectation it would be able to make the organisation more commercial, and develop stronger revenue streams for its rights and sponsorships. To do that, it needs competition – yet New Zealand is likely too small a market for the likes of Amazon, Apple and DAZN – so currently Sky is alone as a plausible bidder for its rights.

That’s partly why it launched NZR+ last year. It’s a brand and streaming platform that aimed to get fans to sign up to watch behind-the-scenes and magazine-style content. It was also intended as a signal to Sky that should it fail to pay what it considers a fair price for rights to Super Rugby and the “teams in black”, that it could always turn on a direct-to-consumer platform. 

Yet in a revealing interview on The Fold podcast, out today, the newish boss of NZ Rugby Commercial, Craig Fenton, all but admits that its strategy has changed. The organisation hasn’t got the numbers it wanted signing up to NZR+, so has pivoted to growing its YouTube audience instead. It has increased by around 60% year-on-year – numbers Fenton says have a direct correlation with the price jersey sponsors are willing to pay.

“You’re constantly trading off between indirect and direct revenue,” says Fenton. “So by direct revenue, I mean a broadcasting rights deal or a direct consumer version of that. You know, we’ve got a paywall on NZR+, for example, in Germany at the moment. So that’s a type of direct revenue from a content perspective. And then indirect revenue is really driven by reach. And you get the most reach if you’ve got content that’s freely available, and most of that consumption happens on social platforms.”

That’s true – but not the whole story. They’re renegotiating a huge contract without much competition, during a moment when the domestic economy is profoundly depressed. The jersey deals run longer, coming up in 2028 – with a decent chance that both domestic and international recoveries are well under way by then. 

The other big opportunity for NZ Rugby is to take a look at some of the smaller organisations’ approaches. Those are borne of necessity, sure – but just as cricket has seen an uptick in interest from both crowds and sponsors since moving to TVNZ (helped by the cult audience the Alternative Commentary Collective has brought to cricket), so rugby could do with a greater level of accessibility too. It already screens Heartland and Grassroots rugby through TVNZ, along with NZR+ and YouTube, while Sky has put more live Super Rugby through its re-emphasised Sky Open channel. 

Perhaps the biggest change since the last rights deal is the rise of the Black Ferns to a new status and prominence. Where before jersey sponsorships and rights deals have been bundled with the All Blacks, making them something like a gift-with-purchase, now they could and should be purchased separately and command significant prices – which will have the handy downstream effect of allowing for increased pay and professionalism in the women’s game.

There is a clear opportunity to push for creating different packages in the new rights deal, with Sky taking the main prize, but saving money by allowing the likes of TVNZ to bid for narrower packages which nonetheless increase overall reach. 

It all ultimately shows just how markedly the sports rights landscape has shifted in a single cycle. An array of smaller deals provide signals for what might occur when the biggest contract of them all drops anew. The sides are negotiating right now, with stakes which will have a profound impact on the future fortunes of both Sky and NZ Rugby. For sports fans, all this is ultimately about how sports organisations get value out of their fans. We’re entering an era in which for some codes, fans’ attention is as valuable as what’s in their wallets.