Who gets to watch: The battle over Australia’s sporting broadcast rights
By Monique Walker
The AFL Grand Final. The Bathurst 1000. The Olympics. For decades, Australians watched all these sports for free. Now they’re quietly slipping behind paywalls.
Online Streaming platforms have changed the way Australian’s consume sport. In 2024, the consumption of live sport via free-to-air (FTA) TV continued to decline, while online platform viewing surged.
Broadcast Exclusivity vs Cultural Expectations
Sport in Australia is more than just entertainment; it is a part of our culture. The AFL Grand Final, the Ashes Boxing Day Test and the Olympics aren’t just games, they are shared experiences influencing ones collective sense of self, identity and pride. The cost of watching sport could easily exceed $2,000 a year, as the Kayo premium membership increased by 15% in 2026. When accessing these events becomes dependent on income, tensions rise.
At the heart of this tension is copyright law. The exclusive sale of broadcasting rights is one of the most important revenue streams for sporting leagues and governing bodies. Rightsholders such as the AFL, Formula One and the Olympic Committee are increasingly auctioning these rights off to the highest bidder, ensuring they receive return on producing high-quality broadcasts.
Get Kylie Pappalardo’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But exclusivity and public expectations are at conflict. While broadcasters rely on exclusive media rights to guarantee financial value of the broadcast, the Australian public has a strong cultural expectation that significant sporting events should be televised for free. Australia’s broadcasting laws are struggling to protect this expectation.
The Anti-Siphoning Scheme: A safety net with holes
The current legal framework in Australia designed to provide free access to iconic sporting events is called the anti-siphoning scheme. This scheme prevents paid media content services, historically Pay TV services (e.g. Foxtel), from acquiring broadcast rights to listed events, deemed of national and cultural significance, before FTA broadcasters have been provided the opportunity to do so. The sports named on the list include AFL, NRL, Soccer, Cricket, Tennis, Netball and Motorsport. The idea is that FTA broadcasters have a reasonable chance to buy the broadcasting rights before paid media content services outbid them.
In 2024, the government attempted to modernise the scheme for the first time in decades by extending it to prevent subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) platforms such as Kayo Sport, Stan, and Paramount+ from acquiring rights before FTA broadcasters. The reform came after a government review found that the rise of streaming services has seen culturally significant events migrate behind online paywalls. On paper this looks like progress. However, do these reforms create more lucrative loopholes that FTA broadcasters with affiliate SVOD platforms can exploit?
Loophole fears
The scheme provides FTA broadcasters first access to the rights, but it doesn’t compel them to use those rights in a meaningful way. An FTA broadcaster can acquire the rights to events on the anti-siphoning list and can opt to broadcast parts of the event, broadcast it on delay or not at all.
A more troubling issue arises is when FTA broadcasters and SVOD platforms are owned by the same corporate group. Both Channel 9 (Stan) and Network 10 (Paramount+) now operate as hybrid networks under a larger company. Under the current scheme, these hybrid networks can acquire the rights to listed events through their FTA subsidiary, satisfying the scheme’s legal requirement, while simultaneously restricting premium content exclusively to their SVOD platform.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. During the Milano 2026 Winter Olympics, Nine Entertainment broadcasted selected popular events live on Channel 9/9Now. Yet the less popular events and replays were exclusively available on Stan, leaving Australians who couldn’t afford it or didn’t already subscribe miss out.
What we are yet to know
Currently, we don’t have a clear sense from the research of how these reforms are playing out in practice, particularly whether the hybrid broadcasting model will become industry standard. The research suggest that the reforms have addressed some digital loopholes that previously undermined the scheme. However, an important question remains: have the 2024 reforms simply encouraged broadcasters to find alternative ways to circumvent the scheme? If so, should FTA broadcasters be subject to stronger positive obligations to provide comprehensive free access to listed events, rather than allowing them to funnel premium content behind a paywall?
