The Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association (Astra) pay-television body has submitted a new anti-siphoning proposal to the federal government in an effort to wrest control of sporting rights in the country from free-to-air broadcasters, according to the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.
Under the proposal, Astra said if a sporting body were to sell rights to free-to-air and pay-television broadcasters, then “competing broadcasts” could be introduced.
The proposal would not mean events on free-to-air television channels would be transferred to pay-television channels, but rather there might be parallel broadcasts of events via both methods of delivery.
Australia's anti-siphoning laws ensure that key sporting events are broadcast by free-to-air networks. There are about 1,300 events on the anti-siphoning list.
Andrew Maiden, chief executive of Astra, said the new proposal “is the most reasonable our sector has produced in many years, which seeks to reduce the length of the list and also seeks to introduce more competition between broadcasters for what remains on the list”.
He added: “At the moment, the anti-siphoning mechanism is constructed as though the public-policy rationale is to give free-to-air networks protected access to sporting rights. But in fact the public-policy rationale of the anti-siphoning regime is only to ensure the viewing public have access to certain sports at no cost.
“What we propose is to put more power in the hands of the sports bodies themselves so they can decide to sell subscription rights directly to subscription providers, or free-to-air rights directly to free providers.
“We believe that they're (sports bodies) best placed to determine how they balance the revenue they might get from subscription with the reach they might get with free.”