NRL suffers another hit as TV ratings down for the second year in a row
Exclusive Josh Massoud
The Daily Telegraph
September 11, 2014 12:00AM
FOR the second year running, the NRL has suffered a major ratings hit with TV audiences down by another 3.6 million across Australia and New Zealand in 2014.
The NRL has also failed to reach its crowd target of 16,500 for this season, recording a 15,900 average that was almost identical to last year’s attendance result.
The Daily Telegraph yesterday obtained the final TV ratings figures for the 26-round regular season, which reveal significant drops for all three official broadcasters — Channel Nine, Fox Sports, and Sky New Zealand.
With fans increasingly turning to social and digital media, Nine’s lost an estimated 2.3 million viewers across all free-to-air slots for competition matches. That equates to a seven per cent slump on last year, which, in turn, was down 3.8 per cent on 2012.
Pay TV ratings are slipping away even faster, with NRL audiences for Fox Sports games on Saturday, Sunday and Monday down 10 per cent — a loss of 1 million sets of eyeballs across the regular season. The downward spiral continued from last year, when Fox Sports ratings suffered an 8.5 per cent slide from 2012.
And in New Zealand, where the Warriors failed to make the finals for the third straight season, ratings were down a whopping 21 per cent from 12 months ago.
The great irony of back-to-back seasons of plummeting ratings is their coincidence with code’s richest-ever broadcast deal — a five-year contract worth $1.025 billion. With television audiences down across the board thanks to the rise of new media, the pattern looks set to continue for the term of the contract, placing a major question mark over the NRL’s ability to match the current price when the current rights expire at the end of 2017.
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