In the final of a three-part series on rugby’s streaming wars, Gregor Paul looks at plans to sell the All Blacks to the world.
Part I: Spark Sport’s rise and fall
Part II: What is the future of watching rugby?
For the last two decades, the only content sports bodies believed they could sell were the rights to live matches.
Selling broadcast rights to the big games was where the big leagues made all their money.
Then a few years ago, Drive to Survive popped up on Netflix and forced a massive rethink.
Formula 1, a sport that is not everyone’s cup of tea, was suddenly winning millions of new followers by telling the backstories of its drivers and revealing the personality clashes and tensions within and between the various competing teams.
Drive to Survive has managed to make Formula 1 the most compelling reality TV show in the world and every sports code seemingly wants to create their own version of the cult hit.
This isn’t necessarily new. Amazon ran a series called All or Nothing in the mid-to-late 2010s that went behind the scenes of major sporting franchises such as the LA Rams, Manchester City and, of course, the All Blacks.
Netflix earlier this year carried a series called Breakpoint which was an in-depth look at the lives of leading tennis players and the same channel is making a behind-the-scenes documentary about this year’s Six Nations.
What’s different now is the scale of these projects and the profile they can deliver if done well.
What Drive to Survive has done is show the virtuous circle that can be created by using unique access to the athletes to create docuseries content that is not only valuable but can draw a new audience to the live content and massively drive up the value of those rights.
New Zealand Rugby (NZR) has been ahead of the curve on this line of thinking. Its rationale for agreeing to let Amazon go behind the scenes with the All Blacks during the Lions tour and Rugby Championship was to expose the team to new, international audiences.
It was never really about the upfront payment Amazon made, but the chance to show life inside the team to millions of offshore sports followers, in the hope it would deepen their interest in the All Blacks and potentially lead to them spending money on the brand, be it through purchasing merchandise, match tickets or pay-per-view packages to live broadcasts.
Having dipped its toe in this water, so to speak, NZR is eager to look at new projects for the All Blacks of a similar nature as part of its broadcast strategy and the Herald understands it may already have plans for a specific World Cup documentary.
The timing feels right given the popularity of this genre and because it would be helpful for NZR if compelling All Blacks content is winning rave reviews next year, when it is likely to begin the process of renegotiating its broadcast rights.
Also, and maybe most important, NZR is thought to have committed to launching its own content hub and it’s going to need an estimated 100 hours of programming to offer consumers.
But there are serious doubts as to whether NZR can pull off the dual and conflicting goals of making genuinely entertaining content while protecting the values of the All Blacks and the team’s intellectual property.
The All Blacks have always carried a mystique, built on the air of secrecy they have maintained about how the team operates.
Foreign media like to say the All Blacks have an aura, which is overstating things, but gets the point across that they are a team that opponents fear because they don’t know what makes them tick.
All Blacks coaches and players have been fiercely protective of their inner sanctum. They have never invited journalists or cameras inside the team to see how it works and the Amazon documentary of 2017 caused tension between the All Blacks and NZR.
This was a commercial project that impacted upon the high-performance mechanics of the team. The players didn’t necessarily want Amazon there, but their employer did so they had to find a way to let the cameras roll without allowing them access to things they didn’t want the public to see.
It made for a tense few months and when All Blacks coach Steve Hansen spoke about the project shortly before it was released, his lack of enthusiasm for it was obvious.
“I don’t know if I am happy with it or not, but it is not really for me to be happy about it,” he said.
“Amazon paid for it, as long as they are happy I suppose.
“I think we have managed to keep most of our IP [intellectual property] safe, but it will be interesting for some people to watch — I am sure it will be quite exciting.”
The other concern for Hansen was the impact on performance — not that he or any player is blaming the making of the documentary for the drawn series with the Lions.
No one should doubt, though, that there is a level of distraction that comes with these sorts of projects and that distraction can be devastating in high-performance environments.
This issue is not All Blacks-specific either, as it was raised by Warren Gatland earlier this year when he returned to coach Wales and discovered Netflix cameras embedded with the team when he arrived.
“In the past when we’ve had the crews that have been involved with Lions and Wales, what’s been important is their ability to create a relationship with the players and the coaching team, so it’s almost like they become an invisible part of it.
“Then you find yourself just carrying on with your normal routine, because of the trust that you build up with them.
“So that’s the challenge with Netflix. At the moment my understanding is that we don’t have any editorial rights and that is a little bit of a concern because you want to make sure you are able to protect yourself.”
Rugby, as a hugely tactical sport where fine detail matters, is never likely going to be overly comfortable with cameras inside the highest-profile teams trying to tease out secrets.
And if players are never fully invested in the projects they are being asked to make, the end product is likely to reflect their lack of buy-in and fail to fully engage the audience.
John Fellet, the former Sky chief executive, says the compounding issue for the All Blacks is that they are a team that has steadfastly refused to allow individual personalities to flourish.
In his interactions with the team, he felt the players lacked charisma in their media appearances and were overly conditioned to providing bland exchanges that made it hard to sell the sport.
What’s made Drive to Survive such a success is the openness of the drivers, their willingness to speak their minds and the drama that has created.
But the All Blacks have lived in an overly controlled and managed world for the last two decades, where the players have been encouraged to be guarded with the media, and to rely on regurgitating a handful of cliched phrases as stock answers to nearly all questions.
The shortcomings of this media strategy were best exposed by the Black Ferns last year, who won global admiration for their authenticity, lack of inhibition and willingness to be themselves while living under intense scrutiny.
And it’s perhaps telling that Sky chief executive Sophie Moloney hints that her company may have more interest in making long-form content about women’s rugby.
She says: “The value is in engaging existing and new audiences by telling compelling stories that reach behind the sport itself. Our new World Rugby deal [winning the rights to the next four World Cups], includes some special plans to co-create this sort of content, with an emphasis on women’s rugby.”
While it’s going to be a challenge for NZR to make documentary-style content that promotes the All Blacks without selling out the players and negatively impacting performance, there is some confidence it can be done.
Rob Nichol, who heads the New Zealand Rugby Players’ Association, says there is a sweet spot where the interests of all the parties — players, NZR and TV producers — converge.
He’s of the view that the current generation of players are more inclined and certainly more willing to share their stories, and that they would embrace the chance to be part of a docuseries that took fans behind the scenes of the All Blacks.
More importantly, however, he feels deep-dive, unique storytelling is one of the best ways in which rugby can win back a youthful audience that has migrated towards other sports in the last decade or so.
“This is an opportunity for high-performance sport to engage with fans in a way that ensures sport can be relevant in their lives,” says Nichol.
“Things going through our head at the moment, is that it is really important that we have a content strategy that ensures we remain authentic to what the game is and how New Zealanders see the game and that we do it in a way that makes New Zealanders proud.
“It will be projected to the world and rugby has always been an important part of New Zealand’s identity on the global stage so it must be done in a respectful way to the role rugby has played.
“We can’t be all about clickbait stuff that creates controversy. That’s not going to be long-term and this is about lasting content.
“We want to do it in a way that it’s safe for the people in that environment — players, coaches, team management. We don’t want to set people up for failure or embarrassment. Just because you are producing a docuseries to engage fans globally, you don’t compromise on those values and principles.
“The other part to it is that there is an expectation of performance on our national teams. Whatever we do in this production area, it has to enhance the performance of the team.
“People have said the game is losing the edge in that space at the moment for various reasons, but this represents an opportunity to turn that around.”
And the issue of engaging younger rugby followers is one that has vexed NZR for some time, as participation rates among teen boys have collapsed in recent years and it’s also been an issue for Sky to engage and retain younger viewers.
Maloney says: “We agree that is a challenge for all sports bodies the world over when grappling with a generation who have not necessarily grown up on the sidelines of sport.”
But figures in the last few years have shown a growth in rugby interest among younger New Zealanders, with a 21 per cent rise in the number of 15- to 29-year-olds watching Super Rugby in the last two years.
Retaining and growing this demographic as avid lovers of the game is going to be critical to rugby’s ability to continue to commercialise the All Blacks domestically and build interest internationally.
And maybe, says one analyst, NZR need to look at longer-form, unique access content, not as a commercial enterprise but as a means to reposition the sport as one younger people want to engage with, and as a catalyst to reset its wider relationship with all media.
New Zealand’s media, in comparison with their British and French counterparts, are given limited access to players and almost no opportunities to drive out the depth of story that makes compelling reading.
One source says that keeping the media at arm’s length is part of NZR’s strategy to “control the narrative”, ahead of having its own content hub up and running.
But without a hub currently in operation and all live content behind a paywall, rugby is struggling to sell itself to a generation which has gravitated to the open access and uninhibited honesty of the athletes in American sports such as NBA and NFL.
NZR rejected the opportunity to be interviewed for this series or to answer specific questions via email, opting to send this statement from chief executive Mark Robinson: “The ability to connect with fans by using content as the entry point gives us the opportunity to improve all our revenue streams.
“A move into the content space isn’t a content play per se rather an opportunity to get closer to our fans thus being able to put them at the centre of all our experiences. This is an exciting and new focus which will take time but is necessary.”