My parents, being English, used to get the annual collected Giles cartoons.
Sometime in the 1950s, or perhaps early 1960s, the British Government allowed commercial stations to compete with the BBC.
Giles did a splendid cartoon of a manservant pouring petrol over a television set atop a huge bonfire and an old cricketing buffer in a blazer below saying: “”More on still, Harvey! I won’t have my Test cricket brought to me by someone or other’s miracle pills.”
I have felt like that old buffer on a couple of occasions this year. A Collingwood player had run from the back of the ground, dodging and weaving and bouncing and then kicked a goal from 60 metres out.
Magnificent. I waited to savour the slow-motion replay. And on came an ad for someone or other’s miracle pills.
Was the programmer a Carlton supporter, I thought? No, no. The conspiracy runs deeper than that. We are being softened up. Let me explain how and why.
After the heavies failed to get satellite pay-TV licences because of the extravagant bidding by unknowns, did they say to themselves: “”Bad luck chaps, we missed out in a fair auction, let’s do something else”?
Oh no. The licence is only one of four elements to pay television. The others are: the black box; the delivery platform and the product.
Whether the pay-TV signal comes from cable, satellite or ground station, a black box will have to sit on top of the TV decoding and recording viewing time so you can get billed. (Dozing off with a late whisky could become an expensive habit.) Say, five million black boxes at $250 each. Big dough. There is also big dough in the cable, satellites or ground stations. But the product is the issue here: the sporting spectacle.
First to some legal history.
In 1937, the High Court ruled that there was no property in the spectacle of a sporting event. The case was about the Victoria Park Racing a Recreation Grounds Co Ltd which put on race meetings at great expense. In an adjacent paddock one Taylor erected a high platform from which a race caller could see the races and notices of scratchings and the like, and send them by land line to a radio station, which he did. Victoria Park wanted them stopped, arguing that fewer people were coming to see the races because of the broadcasts. (No doubt the real issue was SP book-making.) The High Court said, however, that there was no property in the spectacle. Victoria Park would just have to keep building fences higher than Mr Taylor’s platform.
The case has since been over-ruled, not legally, but technologically. Television demands more than one camera from a distant platform.
So when we talk about broadcast rights we are really talking about the right to go on to the ground with a television camera. And the owner of the ground can allow or refuse that, according to the fabulous sums of money the broadcaster is prepared to pay. And the owner can attach conditions, such as to broadcast to free-to-air television and/or pay television and only if all tickets at the ground have been sold.
There is nothing to stop the AFL and the NSW Rugby League selling the right to both free and pay broadcast to the one person (and they have done so). That person can then on-sell the pay-TV rights to someone who happens to have a pay-TV licence.
Of course, the owner of the pay-TV licence might want to negotiate direct with the AFL or the NSW Rugby League or any other sporting body. But they will find usually find that the rights to the big events have already been sold as part of package. The big free-to-air players thus get the fingers into the pay-TV pie.
The softening up process, I mentioned earlier, is to ensure that at least some people will move to pay-TV when it arrives. To do that you lace the free-to-air program with ads. Maybe it’s my imagination, but there seems to be a lot more of them now pay-TV is on the horizon, and a lot fewer slow-motion replays.
After the softening up, the big player who buys both pay and free-to-air rights to sporting spectacles will get both markets for the same game. People like the old buffer in the Giles cartoon and me, who get incensed at advertisements will happily pay to be rid of them. We will watch on pay-TV and happily pay a few dollars not to have our coverage spoiled. People not prepared to pay or who have little money will watch free-to-air, advertisements included.
Don’t worry about the effectiveness of advertisements in a market rid of the sort of people who can afford to pay to be rid of them: those sort of people may have a higher disposable income, but I suspect they are less responsive to advertisements (especially for mass products) than many people on lower incomes.
A week ago, the Australian Broadcasting Authority _ charged with making recommendations about which major sporting and cultural events should remain free-to-air _ very wisely passed the decision back to the government and made no decision itself.
Indeed, there is no decision to be made. Neither the Government nor the perhaps the ABA realise that major spectacles can be televised profitably in two ways: free-to-air with ads or on pay-TV without ads and that the market will probably support simultaneous broadcast of both.
As for week-by-week sport, pay-TV will be well ahead. Pay can put on all six or seven weekend matches live, and most people will happily pay to watch “”their” team play rather watch free the “”match of the day” between two other teams.
So, the real issue is not the major sporting and cultural events. They will get covered twice. The real issue is at the minor end. It is whether pay-TV results in a swamping of Australian product with cheap imports.