Merryn Sherwood
speaker
78 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Merryn Sherwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Certainly the second game, there was over 6 million viewers in Australia, if you count the live free-to-air TV audience at its peak, and then also the streaming audience.
And I think Origin has perhaps actually been undercapitalised as a broadcast product previously, and I think we're really seeing that come through in the ratings numbers now, and that's obviously really helped this deal.
But it's pretty unique when you can actually get the best players from a club to come out of their club and play a representative game in the middle of the season.
But this kind of Origin competition is quite unique, and we're really seeing the value come through now.
Well, they're actually getting pretty much the same they're getting now, except I guess, obviously, of course, we have forecast that there will be an extra game when the new teams come in.
So I guess what we're seeing though is that the game has become more valuable and that's why they are willing to pay more.
I think also here the bidding process, Peter Volandes, Andrew Abdo, the other people involved in this process, really did create a competitive environment and that did push up the value.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's been a few questions around, you know, is this actually worth the money for Channel 9 and for Foxtel and KO to have these rights?
And I think the question really is, can you afford to give them up?
When you look at Australia's media rights market and the sports that are leading, the AFL and the NRL are in those top positions because they do bring in the biggest audiences.
And so really having those properties is really critical to your success as a broadcaster.
And so that's why Channel 9 I think really went in with the idea that they needed to retain this and I think that obviously put the NRL in a great position to negotiate.
He is, yes, and is spending up very big on a lot of sports rights.
To zone
It's made some huge global deals.
They're a huge global sports streamer and they are basing their success on globally acquiring sports rights.
So the fact that they have brought out the Foxtel Group, this is interesting too because I think this is their first kind of involvement in a broadcast rights deal in Australia.
There was potentially questions around whether they would find Australian sport maybe less valuable and the rights wouldn't be as important to them as some other international markets.
But the fact that people involved in this afterwards have been talking about the use of DAZN's 200 international markets to bring the NRL into.
I think it's interesting and I think it seems like they are going to use the NRL as another premier sports product as part of their programming.
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