Australia has a large, committed population of petrol heads, and with the racing calendar active from February to December, it guarantees potentially 200,000-plus subscribers year-round. While the sport has exploded in popularity since the launch of Netflix’s Drive to Survive, legacy broadcasters are tightening their belts, and international sports broadcasters like ESPN are narrowing their focus.
In America, incumbent ESPN let its exclusivity period with the F1 lapse this year, and AppleTV+ is set to step in off the back of F1:The Movie’s success. Apple did not appear to take a swing on the rights in Australia, nor did Netflix.
Fight for your rights
ESPN’s current content strategy could have knock-on effects in Australia. Last week, the UFC announced it was leaving it for Network 10 owners Paramount in 2026, in a deal worth $US7.7 billion ($12 billion) over seven years in the US alone.
UFC is also moving away from pay-per-view for its big events, with all bouts included in a Paramount+ subscription, and some of the spectacle will also find a home at Paramount’s free-to-air network CBS.
How that impacts Foxtel is still up in the air. It extended its current arrangement with ESPN last week, with a separate “multi-year” (this usually means two or three) pay-per-view deal kicking off in 2024. We hear Paramount might have landed exclusive first-refusal of any new rights deals in international markets as part of its deal.
But with the Conor McGregor glory-days of the UFC over, the big game for Foxtel is its negotiations with NRL, and how willing DAZN’s owner Len Blavatnik will be to loosen the purse-strings to retain the rights to the tier one sport.
NRL boss Peter V’Landys [third from left]; Patrick Delany [fifth from left] with DAZN’s billionaire owner Len Blavatnik [fifth from right] and CEO Shay Segev [third from right] in New York in July.
NRL powerbroker Peter V’Landys, Foxtel’s Delany and Kayo and Binge chief Hilary Perchard were guests of DAZN at the FIFA Club World Cup final in New York last month. All three posed for a picture alongside Blavatnik and CEO Shay Segev, with V’Landys, third-from-left, sporting a DAZN hat.
Surely, a vote of confidence?
Minister’s homecoming
He was spotted visiting Nine’s 1 Denison St headquarters in recent weeks, and we can confirm former Coalition communications spokesperson David Coleman has been hired by the company to help identify business opportunities after its sale of home listings portal Domain.
Former opposition foreign affairs and communications spokesman David Coleman is joining Nine.Credit: Paul Jeffers
Coleman, the Member for Banks from 2013 to May this year, is a former director of strategy and digital at Nine, and was involved in the launch of Stan. He’ll be in North Sydney two days a week, but won’t be using his Rolodex to help the company’s lobbying efforts in the national capital.
Nine will net $1.4 billion for its stake in Domain, and after all is said and done with shareholders, should be left with a war chest of about $150 million in cash, analysts say, which is plenty to play with.
More Australian content on Apple TV+?
The world’s third-largest company is hiring for a new marketing lead in Australia and New Zealand, just months after advertising for its first head of Apple TV down under.
While Netflix has found success making a handful of Australian shows every year, Apple might be dipping its toes in the water while streaming content quotas remain up in the air. A leading contender for the Apple gig, and for Netflix’ vacant content lead role, is Alison Hurbert-Burns, who left Foxtel earlier this year. Que Minh Luu, who recently left Netflix is also rumoured to be in the running at Apple.
Busy Bibi
Sharri Markson has been cultivating a senior source inside the Israeli Knesset for some time, travelling to Jerusalem in 2024 for 45-minute “secret briefing” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The hard work has clearly paid off.
Bibi took time to drop into Sharri Markson’s Sky News show this week. Credit: AP
Sky News’ Markson managed to bag an exclusive chat with Bibi, who was fresh off his war of words with our own prime minister. It aired last night.
The Israeli leader is clearly a man with a lot on his plate. You have to wonder where he finds time to do it all. But if Bibi was trying to make a splash, Sky After Dark’s audience is hardly the ABC in prime time. Last time we checked, Sharri’s average nightly broadcast audience was about 31,000, but we concede there’s a much bigger audience on YouTube.
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