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AFANA's US Footy viewing "State of the Nation" address

  • Monday, March 21 2016 @ 09:24 am ACDT
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North America
AFANA’s Rob de Santos gives his US Footy viewing “State of the nation” address in the following article. A great read on how the US telecast situation has evolved and an evaluation of the options going forward. As always for any  up to date information relating to the North American TV coverage of AFL footy you should visit the AFANA website.
 
(This is the first in a series of long form editorials on the state of footy on TV in 2016 and the future outlook.) A long time ago in TV world far, far away, a small group of passionate AFL fans managed to get the AFL and ESPN together and save the weekly highlights coverage on US and Canadian television. It was an early and largely unnoticed accomplishment of the internet age as e-mail and newsgroups were the media used to launch coordinated action. Looking back, it was an amazing achievement in 1995-1996. It also was the catalyst for the formation of AFANA.
 
Over the past 20 years we’ve evolved from lobbying by fans to more sophisticated ways of attempting to drive the AFL’s TV strategy (with varying degrees of success). We’ve successfully helped steer them to new TV homes for the sport when old ones blew up on us. We’ve succeeded in keeping it on the air for 21 seasons without fail. Now, we have to decide what we do in 2016 and beyond. The answers for 1996 and 2006 no longer are the right ones. The TV market has changed. The fan base has changed.
 
The AFL is far more media savvy than before and nominally, has an “international” strategy (although fans and marketing seem not to be a big part of that). We must change our tactics and strategy to deal with the AFL, TV networks, and fan development to match the world as it is in 2016.

 

Let’s take a look at the US landscape today (we’ll deal with Canada and Mexico in a future article):
 
Fox is in the last year of the AFL contract in the US. Fox has been tight-lipped about whether they will continue in 2017 but history tells us that we shouldn’t be surprised either way. We believe the AFL and Fox are in communication but we can’t say more than that at present. Last year the two Fox networks provided more than 430 separate telecasts of footy including over 135 live matches (preseason, in-season and post-season). Coverage reached the astonishing level of just under 1,200 hours! (Back in 1996, we were thrilled to get less than 24 hours and just 3 hours live.) By the way this exceeds the number of hours of coverage of many better known sports and is on a par with UFC.
 
Read the rest of the story here.