Australian Open resorts to animated caricatures to bypass broadcast restrictions

The copyright situation is distinct, and may fall under "hot news", but isn't affected by a clickwrap on the site that sold you the ticket.

(See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v._... )

It's not really a surprise Roy & HG do a better job than the TV commentary. I still have no idea what name gymnastics uses to describe the "Hello Boys" and "Dutch Wink" manoeuvres. The curious can view some of them here: https://www.royandhg.com/gymnastics

"And New Zealanders perform at their best when they're sitting down going backwards." Such astute observations are Roy's trademark.

Personally, I wouldn't do it because I don't even want to spend the time subscribing (and then unsubscribing, and dealing with whatever other issues come up), much less watching.

Tennis players are individuals who rarely have leverage/management in place to negotiate for bigger slices of the pie. You only get paid if you win. The base rate for the Australian Open is about 20k USD, which if you are an international travelling, would barely cover costs if you had multiple support staff you had to support on the road for the two weeks the tournament runs

https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-is-no-longer-the-king-of...

If traffic by application is of interest to anyone, there should be a new 2025 Sandvine Global Internet Phenomena Report out any day now.

See past reports at: https://www.sandvine.com/phenomena

Music piracy was killed-off by Spotify.

For movies/TV, they'll turn to publicly-shared Plex libraries - I only found out about this a few weeks ago: so in 2025, with more-and-more people having high-upload-bandwidth Internet connections it turns out that now you don't need a distributed DHT-based swarm of chunks of files with hundreds of seeders: all you need is a couple generous individuals running an open Plex box that's served-up behind a cheap offshore VPN provider, using the official Plex App from the Samsung TV app-store.

...I've no idea how long that's going to last: running behind a VPN means the MPAA (et al.) can't do much against those sharing their collections publicly like they did with BitTorrent (c.f. PeerGuardian), and Plex has somehow survived this-far given it does have legitimate uses, and the apps don't violate any app-store policy I'm aware-of, so I'm concerned the MPAA is going to lobby for some laws outright prohibiting apps/software/technology that facilitates piracy for nontechnical users somehow.

(Or they could follow GabeN's advice and start offering a superior service and convenience to the user with a cooperative consolidation of all rightsholders under a single branded tent, but we all know that's not going to happen)

Taxpayer-funded TV stations aren’t showing major commercial sport in Australia or anywhere else, really.

If it’s not exclusive to pay television, it’s on free-to-air commercial networks. These are fully private companies that pay a large license fee to use spectrum, and fund their purchase of the sports broadcasting rights by selling advertising (usually at peak rates as these events are very popular).

In Australia, all four of the Grand Slam tennis tournaments are shown on free-to-air commercial TV. No taxpayer funding whatsoever but easily accessible to everyone.

Yes it does, 100%.

Once you've got content that people in multiple countries want to watch, you've broadly got two options: let everyone watch on the same terms, or split it up by region. Even Netflix chooses the latter - each country that Netflix has customers in has a different price for subscribing. (They also have different libraries of media that can be watched, but that's mainly as a result of the companies they license it from doing different deals for different countries, as far as I know Netflix do release their own content in all regions at the same time.)

This is because if you don't price it differently, you either price it for countries like the US, and make it unaffordable - or too expensive to be worth paying for, at least - for much of the world, or you price it more cheaply and leave money on the table from Americans (and other rich countries) who would've been willing to pay more.

If the media industry hadn't existed before the internet then probably all companies would look more like Netflix and the other streaming companies, and it would be simple for all content to be licensed globally to the same streaming platform. But because both historically and still today we have broadcast companies which are country specific, any time they get involved (which is pretty much every time with the exception of content made by the steaming companies themselves), you now not only have custom pricing per country but also custom where-can-you-watch per country. And while this can be annoying, it ultimately leads to the content owners earning more than if they didn't do specific deals with specific broadcasters and instead sold a single package to a single streaming company.

> "Would traditional media have been able to produce Squid Games?"

I'm not sure what aspect of it you think required Netflix, but for decades media companies have been producing things with more than a single country in mind - whether that's BBC's Top Gear being syndicated to a huge number of countries, or Friends being dubbed in French, or whatever. I don't see any reason that a BBC or Apple or whoever else couldn't have done it, the only difference is that BBC doesn't have a global distribution platform like Netflix does, so BBC would have had to do deals with broadcasters (or streaming companies) for any country they want viewers in other than the UK.