Channel Seven bags broadcasting rights for Cricket Australia home matches
The infamous ball-tampering saga has resulted in Cricket Australia and Channel nine ending their four decades of partnership with each other. CA, meanwhile, has announced that Channel Seven will be the partner for all home matches for a period of six years, simultaneously with Foxtel Sports.
In the recently concluded bidding process for Cricket Australia TV rights, Channel Seven, along with pay television partner Foxtel, won the bid to telecast the Australian home matches for the next six years starting from mid-summer 2018-19. On Friday (April 13), CA confirmed the same partnership by announcing the clause of the new deal.
“The six-year deal is worth (AUD) $1.182 billion and is the first time that Nine has lost the cricket rights in 40 years after Kerry Packer famously bid for the sport in the late 1970s”.
James Sutherland, the CA chief executive, said that it was a "very exciting" announcement for Australian cricket, especially the way things have changed ironically in the last one month.
"Cricket has been through a tough couple of weeks but it is resilient. We obviously have some rebuilding to do and we have spoken to Seven and Fox and we are committed to rebuilding that trust."
Channel Seven now will broadcast all Tests played in Australia and 43 of the 59 Big Bash League (BBL) matches. Foxtel will cover all those games simultaneously and has exclusive rights to ODIs and T20Is, which means the Australian games on home soil will be behind a paywall for the first time. Foxtel will also have exclusive rights to 16 BBL games, 13 domestic One-day Cup matches, the Sheffield Shield Final, along with some tour matches.
Largely excited about the deal, Patrick Delany, Foxtel chief executive, said that their team will come up with an innovative way of telecasting cricket with young and exclusive commentary panel. At the same time, Tim Worner, channel Seven chief executive, said the free-to-air network would be "unrelenting in our efforts to lift cricket to a new level.”
Channel Nine, who continued to be the broadcaster of Australian Cricket since 1970s, wished good luck for new broadcasters and affirmed their audiences that the channel will still broadcast major events like the next Ashes series from England in 2019, the ODI World Cup in the UK in the same year, and the 2019 T20 World Cup to be held in Australia.
The current deal will be an increase up to (AUD) $600 million of CA’s existing five-year deal. By no way, it's coming closer to the Australian Football League's (AFL) record six-year $2.5 billion agreement with Seven, Fox Sports and Telstra defining the contrasting demand about these two sports in Australia.
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