Atomic 212 chairman and founder Barry O’Brien believes that sport is the most powerful force in media, and Nine and Foxtel’s seven-year deal with the NRL reflects that.

The NRL’s record-breaking seven-year, $5.3 billion television rights deal announced this week settles an argument that was never really in doubt. Live sport is the most powerful and valuable content in media.

Analysts and Foxtel and Nine Network’s critics will pick apart the numbers. Rivals will insist that Foxtel and Nine have overpaid.

But strip away the noise and one truth remains: Foxtel and Nine need NRL, so the deal had to be done. The price reflects not just the value of rugby league today, but the very real power of sport in media.

We keep hearing that free-to-air television is dying. The streamers are taking over and linear TV is finished. But someone forgot to tell the viewers.

The second State of Origin NRL game this this year drew a record television audience of more than 4.3 million. The Fifa World Cup has stopped the country. The Australian Open captures millions of viewers every January. Test cricket fills summer nights. AFL and NRL deliver massive audiences, week after week, for months at a time.

Both Nine and Seven are drawing very large audiences for sport on their free streaming platforms (as does SBS with the World Cup). The death of free-to-air TV has been greatly overstated, and the evidence is there in the ratings every single week.

What the doom merchants miss is that not all content is created equal. A drama series, no matter how good, can wait. You can watch it tomorrow, next week, on the plane.

Live sport cannot wait.

It has to be experienced in real time, because the moment it ends, the result is everywhere. The tension, the tribalism, the not-knowing – that’s what makes sport appointment viewing in the truest sense. You show up, or you miss out. No streaming algorithm has yet worked out how to replicate that.

SPORT AD NEWS WITH EMOTION

Only live news comes close to the power of live sport. Breaking stories, election nights, and unfolding crises are the moments when audiences gather around a screen because they have to know what’s going on, right now.

But sport delivers that urgency with an emotional intensity that news cannot match. The NRL and the AFL run for eight months, so on any given weekend, live sport fills much of the TV schedule from mid-morning to midnight and audiences follow all of it.

What makes sport uniquely powerful is that it’s built on tribes. An NRL or AFL club doesn’t just have fans, it has communities, including families who have barracked for the same team across generations, friends who argue about the weekend game every Monday and people who define part of their identity through their club.

That depth of emotional investment translates directly into audience engagement, and audience engagement is what every broadcaster, every advertiser and every streaming platform is chasing. Sport delivers it consistently, reliably and at scale.

AN EVOLUTION TO PLATFORM

For marketers and agencies, sport is one of the few environments left in media that offers genuinely large and attentive audiences in a brand-safe context. The proliferation of rights across free-to-air, pay TV and streaming has made the media buy more complex, but it has also created more entry points for brands that previously couldn’t get near live sport. Sport is now a premium media channel; not just a content category, but a platform in its own right.

Foxtel has built most of its business model around that. Sport underpins everything it does and NRL, AFL and cricket sit at the centre of it.

NRL is a critically important product for Nine. The question of whether or not they’ve paid too much misunderstands the stakes entirely. You don’t price sport purely on current value. You price it on trajectory. And the trajectory of live sport in a fragmenting media landscape is up.

The broader lesson from this deal isn’t really about Foxtel, Nine or the NRL. It’s about what happens to media when content can be consumed anywhere, anytime, on any device.

When almost everything is available on demand (that is, delayed viewing), the things that cannot be consumed on demand become more valuable, not less. Live sport is the clearest example of that dynamic in action, and every major rights deal – from the NRL and the AFL to the Premier League to the Olympic Games – confirms it.

You can debate the dollars paid. Some people will argue hard that Foxtel and Nine paid too much. But you can’t dispute what the price reflects: sport is the most powerful force in media, and the gap between live sport and everything else is only going to widen.

Barry O’Brien is the founder and chairman of Atomic 212, and an Australian ad industry veteran. He received an Order of Australia Medal in 2014 and was inducted into the MFA Hall of Fame in 2025.

Article originally published on Mumbrella.