Yesterday evening I felt bored, and for the first time in years turned on the TV. Okay, women’s final of the Sydney International - but the reason I turned it on was to catch the end of the first one day international between Australia and India.
I flicked through channel after channel - how long have we had so many channels?! Having finally made it through half-a-dozen channels broadcasting the same movie, and another half dozen broadcasting a different movie, and all sorts of other forgettable garbage (including a bunch of digital radio) I finally turned to the Internet.
It turns out that the one day series is not on free to air television. Further investigation found I could pay Rupert for the right to watch it (and that’s not happening). Then I found a (somewhat) useful article about the anti-siphoning laws - on the same website that told me I could no longer get my FTA ODIs.
So either:
- no free-to-air station wants the rights to broadcast the one day cricket; or
- Cricket Australia asking too much for those rights; or
- free-to-air television is happy to operate in a cartel-like manner, in order that most Australians cannot watch their national men’s cricket team play a home match against another national men’s cricket team.
Am I late to this story? I am disgusted that with so many stations broadcasting so much repetitive junk I cannot simply sit back and watch the cricket.
Do the anti-siphoning laws need to be revisited? I know that back when pay TV started in Australia the government assumed we would take to it as much as the US has - but that is definitely not the case, and I am deeply disappointed that a major national sport like this can be siphoned by a pay TV network.
Do any Choice Community participants know more about how this occurred, and perhaps why?
