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Game over for Territory viewers

The ABC chooses state-based rugby over Aussie Rules, leaving Northern Territory viewers without.

Aussie Rules fans in the Northern Territory look like being out of luck with live telecasts of AFLQ matches in 2009.

ABC Television’s head of sport and events Iain Knight said his organisation was committed to broadcasting state rugby league matches throughout Queensland.

And telecasts of AFLQ premiership matches in Darwin and Alice Springs will depend on the ABC’s ability to access finals matches in Brisbane. AFL Queensland is a state league of the AFL.

Knight does not want to give Northern Territory viewers a taste of AFLQ games without the promise of finals matches.

“It would not make sense to me and I’m sure the viewers would feel the same,” he told NTNews. “Of course this problem would not have arisen if the NT had gone into the SANFL or WAFL, where the ABC televises Australian football matches.

“We have always directed our resources into rugby league in Queensland and we won’t be changing that.”

AFLNT boss Tony Frawley said a joint arrangement with the ABC, National Indigenous TV and Southern Cross was under discussion.

Source: NTNews

10 Responses

  1. For goodness sakes Ryano just buy a violin. We’re talking about Qld and its preference for league over Aussie Rules. It’s a no brainer. I’m sure our national culture will survive.

  2. Let me get this straight, because I’m a bit confused about what’s happening. Am I right in saying:

    -The ABC, if it broadcasts a state comp, wants to have ‘access’, whatever that means, to both regular and finals matches
    -It can’t get access to the finals, so it doesn’t plan to bother with Qld AFL at all on either Queensland or NT stations (also because it only has a certain amount of money and wants to put its Queensland money into RL rather than AFL)
    -The problem arises because the NT team or whatever decided to join the Qld AFL comp, which the ABC doesn’t want to broadcast, rather than the SA or WA comps which it already broadcasts – if they’d joined one of the latter, the ABC could have just taken the existing feeds of those games and showed them on Territory stations

    If I’m right in saying that, then I don’t think the ABC is acting unreasonably. I don’t know what prevents them having ‘access’ to the finals matches, but I can see the argument that they don’t want to show regular matches and then leave NT viewers with no coverage at all of the finals. Also, given the limited nature of the ABC sports budget, I think it’s fair enough that they’d want to dedicate the money to RL, since reducing the quality of RL coverage for millions of Queenslanders in order to pay for AFL coverage for 200,000 Territorians wouldn’t really be fair.

    Anyway, I didn’t even know that the ABC televised state-level football comps of either code. Why don’t they show state rugby league in NSW?

  3. Yeah who cares about broadcasting Australia’s only indigenous game …Just show English sports instead, rugby is so much more important to our national culture than stupid Aussie Rules.

  4. “We have always directed our resources into rugby league in Queensland and we won’t be changing that.” I 100% agree with this statement and applaud Iain Knight’s stance. AFL may be the number one sport in other states but that will never be the case Queensland. Even when the Lions won three straight premierships, the Broncos were still enjoyed the majority of coverage in the media.

  5. The QRL is the premier state based league in the country. Many of the NSW based NRL teams now have feeder clubs in the QRL.

    I applaud the ABC for continuing to broadcast the QRL and hope that the matches will be available to watch interstate via ABC1 or ABC2.

    On another note, if the ABC doesn’t want to sell their rather large library of Australian sport (both past and present) to free to air or pay tv channels, perhaps they could have their own Australian sport channel to combat what will be a mainly US sport channel in One HD.

  6. It also begins with NT fielding a team to play in the AFLQ competition this year. Obviously there will be some Territorians keen to follow the team’s fortunes in the new league, against teams from around Brisbane and Gold Coast. For the record, AFLQ games have rarely been shown on TV in Queensland.
    Northern Territory Football League, the AFL competition in NT, is played during summer, and will continue to be shown on ABC1 in NT.

  7. “…was committed to broadcasting state rugby league matches throughout Queensland.” Fair enough but what has that got to do with the Northern Territory? Does NT broadcasting come out of QLD?

    “Knight does not want to give Northern Territory viewers a taste of AFLQ games without the promise of finals matches.” Why not? In Melb we had coverage split across channels (one channel didn’t get the rights to show the final). It doesn’t mean viewers have to miss out on 5mths of entertainment because they can’t show a few games.

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