Time for the Networks to put up or shut up!

Paul Johnson reports; Australians deserve to watch sport on Television live, calls on the free-to-air networks to give the fans a better deal or handball it to pay-tv.

The networks want you to believe that free sport on Television is the best thing for everyone, but if they believe that so strongly then why do they refuse to show it live?

The answer is that they put the news and its high ratings first. Not to mention the amount of money they can get from advertising, especially when the sport is not live and they can drag it out with big chunks of ads to keep the revenue coming in, which is of course impossible with live sport due to the small amount of time available for advertisements.

No matter how you put it, Seven, Ten and especially Nine have dropped the ball in recent years. They have treated the sports fan with contempt and now they should pay.

And they may pay very soon thanks to the Howard government's new anti-siphoning laws and the continued rise of pay TV providers especially Foxtel. The networks are running scared, because a government who cares about sport and sports fans alike has stepped in and acted, effectively threatening to give pay TV the rights to show all games live if the networks are continuously unwilling to do so.

In response, the networks have all made campaigns against this supposed injustice using star personalities that are targeting the effect it would have on the viewers wallet, having to pay for watching sport all the time, and are seemingly unwilling to change their ways.

If that is the case then sports fans should unite in droves and subscribe to Pay TV.

The networks are still showing contempt in regards to live sport and, as such, should be punished by losing it, and all the money that goes to them from showing it on a delay, then as a result they would be forced into taking action to get sport and viewers back.

It would be impossible to record all the times that not only have key AFL games been shown late at night on a delay in Sydney and Brisbane, or all the times that Perth and Adelaide viewers have had to wait till late at night to watch Rugby League games, even the Grand Final.

Channel 10 treat the Formula 1 World Championship the same way, while Seven’s coverage of the Davis Cup, or Nine’s coverage of Golf Majors like the British Open, being delayed is also unacceptable. In addition, if we even go into all the times the news interrupted a dramatic tennis match at the Australian open or a brilliant period during a cricket game then we would be here all day.

The simple answer is this, either the networks shape up on their policies of not showing sport live by either showing it live or getting another licence to create an individual sports channel each. Otherwise, they thoroughly deserve to lose their sports broadcasting rights.

As of now, you the fan have the power to change things by telling the networks it is not good enough and switching off from their delayed broadcast and subscribing to the Pay TV providers, that way the Australian public can see sport live, like they deserve to.

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