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No deal for early tennis

Nine & Seven unable to reach agreement on a deal over 2019 Australian Open.

Seven will screen both Tennis and Cricket over summer after a “very fair” offer from Nine to take the Australian Open early was rejected.

Fairfax reports the offer represented a $10 million premium on Seven’s current deal with Tennis Australia, which is worth about $40 million a year, but Seven was rumoured to be seeking closer to $60 million.

A source close to Seven said preparation were “well underway” for the network to broadcast both sports.

Seven’s Tennis Australia contract specifies the Open must be aired on its primary channel. It is likely there will be days when the Australian Open coincides with some of the Big Bash and Test matches.

A source said preparation were “well underway” for Seven to broadcast both sports.

Meanwhile Nine, which is without a major sport this summer, will invest in other content.

CEO Hugh Marks said, “We’ve decided that we are going to take the opportunity to commission some additional local programming, which is both an investment in the schedule for next year plus the overall schedule for the future because we get to try a number of things which may or may not succeed.”

But he ruled out the return of Big Brother to the fill the gap, saying Love Island is a similar format.

TEN is also without the Big Bash this summer.

9 Responses

  1. Seven wants it all, and it looks like they do. Cricket, Tennis, Football not my interests at all. Thank goodness we do have a choice now. Come on Nine and Ten show us something worthwhile.

  2. With all this sport we could see multi-channel and network records break. Will be interesting to see how Seven juggle it all, especially since they can’t stream the cricket (correct me if i’m wrong) A silly decision to make during contract talks if you ask me.

  3. Nine are going to gamble that MAFS will do well without promotion during sport. When they put in a low bid for the cricket and concentrated on the tennis this was a possibility. Nine aren’t going to pay more for the tennis than they will pay in 2020, to their rival Seven, especially when it allows Seven to extract maximum revenue from the cricket.

  4. Having no major sport Nine may as well shut up shop for the two weeks of the Tennis With Tennis on main channel and cricket on the multi channels Seven will have massive overall ratings figures for these two weeks

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