By Sam McClure
The AFL will meet with Amazon’s head of content in Los Angeles in the coming days as Gillon McLachlan leads a delegation of senior executives to the US to ramp up talks with media companies for the league’s next broadcast deal.
The outgoing AFL chief, along with broadcasting boss Travis Auld, strategy supremo Walter Lee and football boss Andrew Dillon have scheduled meetings in Los Angeles with Amazon, Paramount and YouTube.
The trip comes after The Age revealed two of the world’s biggest streaming companies, Amazon and Paramount, were bidding to screen AFL matches as part of the next agreement beyond 2024.
Senior AFL sources have told The Age there is now a realistic chance that a streaming company will be broadcasting one or more games per week from the 2025 season.
AFL boss Gillon McLachlan with commission chairman Richard Goyder.Credit: Getty Images
One of the AFL’s first meetings will be with Amazon, where they will be discussing the upcoming broadcast rights deal with Amazon’s head of content for Australia, New Zealand and Canada, Tyler Bern.
The league confirmed on Monday night that McLachlan, who attended the Anzac Day clash between Collingwood and Essendon at the MCG during the afternoon, had boarded a plane to the US along with Auld, Lee and Dillon.
A league spokesman said they were making the trip “for further discussions regarding the AFL’s broadcast arrangements”.
The AFL’s commercial and customer executive Kylie Rogers will act as chief executive in McLachlan’s absence.
Auld, Dillon and Rogers are among the candidates to replace McLachlan after eight years in the job.
McLachlan flagged in his resignation media conference this month that his two key remaining tasks were to negotiate the next broadcast deal and complete the players’ next collective bargaining agreement.
Sources inside the league have said the two priorities are linked because the league is likely to require more cash to fund the salary claims of male players and a near doubling in pay for AFLW players.
The possible involvement of a streaming company in the league’s next rights deal comes with Channel Seven ratings down by more than 18 per cent, compared with five years ago (after the first five rounds), and Fox Footy numbers down 13 per cent. Fox’s streaming service, Kayo, has gone from zero viewers in 2017 to an average 139,000 in the first month of the season.
According to two senior sources inside AFL house, the league has become frustrated at a number of decisions recently made by Seven, including the network’s decision to cancel its football programs Talking Footy and Game Day.
On top of that, the AFL privately concedes that Seven’s broadcast of games has become tired and needs to be rejuvenated.
Nine – the owner of this masthead – and Ten have both shown some interest in being involved in the next broadcast deal.
Internally, senior figures at Nine believe they have their hands full with their broadcasting of the NRL.
Ten hasn’t broadcast the AFL for over a decade. Its last deal began in 2006 and finished in 2010, when Seven became the sole free-to-air broadcaster of games.
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