Nine goes all in on sports with EPL coup to bulk up Stan

4 days ago 3

Nine Entertainment has taken a big swing (or massive header) in buying the broadcast rights to English Premier League and FA Cup soccer to bolster its fledgling Stan Sport streaming service.

These rights, being acquired from Optus, will cost an estimated $60 million a year – the equivalent of around half what Nine pays for the right to major rugby league games.

But while many of us were introduced to the sport via the excitement around the Matildas and the Socceroos international games, these are not part of the package. Paramount and Ten have these matches tied up.

Around half of the roughly 700,000 of the people that watch Optus Sport are not Stan subscribers.

Nine is punting on soccer fans being willing to pay for a Stan subscription and an additional Stan Sport subscription to watch these games. It knows that around half of the roughly 700,000 of the people that watch Optus Sport are not Stan subscribers, so in theory these soccer fans could migrate to Stan.

But some of the Optus subscribers were given concessional rates if they used the Optus phone network so Stan pricing may prove too rich for some soccer fans. Even after accounting for the fact that not all these subscribers are bankable, Nine told investors that the deal would improve Stan’s profit and cashflow.

Fresh from the sale of its 60 per cent stake in real estate portal Domain which netted Nine proceeds of $1.4 billion, Nine’s new boss, Matt Stanton, has the cash to invest. And it is probably no accident that Stanton has chosen Stan Sport as the recipient of the first lick of cash.

Having sold its stake in digital business Domain, Nine needs an asset in which there is potential for growth given free to air television is in long-term decline.

Sure, Domain was not firing in all earnings cylinders, but it was operating in a duopoly in a country that is real estate obsessed. In 2024, Domain grew its profit by 32 per cent.

Stan operates in a highly competitive streaming market and has achieved a creditable performance in subscriber growth and increased profits in the 2024 financial year, when both television and publishing earnings fell.

And for Stan Sport to justify its existence, it needed a go-to sport given its main competitor, Foxtel, has streaming rights to many premium sports including NRL and AFL.

There are plenty of streaming services vying for our eyeballs and wallets, and must-see content determines which we choose. Adding all 380 Premier League matches will bulk up Stan Sport content.

As Nine calls it, Stan Sport is taking its next big leap.

The announcement of Nine’s soccer coup coincided with a report from audience measurement agency OzTAM with additional granular detail of how Australians are allocating their TV set watching time.

The challenged free-to-air networks will be pleased with the findings that 61 per cent of all TV set viewing is accounted for by linear television – the main Nine, Seven, Ten, ABC and SBS channels – and a further 8.2 per cent is spent watching BVOD (catch-up television on digital services such as 9Now and iView).

The report says the 30 per cent remaining is shared by streaming services – dominated by Netflix.

The trouble is that this report stands in contrast to the survey by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which says the proportion of Australian adults watching free-to-air TV has declined from 71 per cent in 2017 to 46 per cent in 2024.

The disparity between the two sets of findings appears to be methodology, but few could dispute that broadcast television has been in structural decline for a decade.

One of the clear shortcomings of the OzTAM analysis is that it does not take into account viewing from devices other than televisions, so it won’t capture what particularly younger Australians watch on their phones, tablets or commuters.

With this in mind, bulking up Stan Sport’s subscriber numbers appears to be a pretty solid strategy.

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