Ann: Trading Update, page-11

I agree that the major piece of programming keeping FTA alive is their sports broadcasting, but i disagree that current anti-siphoning laws will forever remain in place.

Anti-siphoning laws are essentially hidden taxes paid by the owners of sports rights (e.g. NRL, AFL, CA etc.) into the pockets of FTA broadcasters, because the owners of sports rights are forced to sell a portion of their broadcasts to FTA rather than simply the highest bidder. As FTA revenues continue to decline, their capacity to pay market value to sports rights owners declines, so the tax / value transfer becomes larger. At some point in time it will become unsustainable, and the sports rights owners will successfully lobby parliament to have anti-siphoning laws either repealed or the scope thereof heavily whittled down.

Australia's anti-siphoning laws, by the way, are very restrictive in a global developed economy context. I live in the US and the world works perfectly fine with user-pays sports programming - i either buy cable to get access to additional sports programming, or i 'cut the cord' and if i really like a particular league (NBA, MLB, NFL etc.) i can simply buy a year-round subscription direct from the league for a few hundred dollars and stream every single game whenever i want. I was already doing this for AFL before i relocated to the US - a $100 subscription got me every single game i wanted for an entire season, much better than paying nearly $100 per month for a FoxTel subscription which comes with a whole bunch of crap i don't want to watch.

FTA can lobby all they like, but they ultimately won't stop the global, inexorable trend toward user-pays sports programming, which is really driven by 'unbundling' and simply paying for and streaming what you want to watch on demand.