Talk:Wide World of Sports (Australia)
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Wide World of Sports was an Australian television show that appeared on the Nine Network. The show enjoyed a long run on television. In the 1980s it was hosted by Mike Gibson and Ian Chappell, before being hosted in the 1990s by Max Walker and Ken Sutcliffe. The show ended in 1997, after the network axed some of its under-performing shows.
In 2000 Nine acquired broadcast rights for Friday night and Sunday games in the Australian Football League, the elite Australian Rules Football competition, displacing the Seven Network which had held the rights for over 40 years. The deal assigned the rights for finals broadcasting to Network Ten, a deal which reportedly flabbergasted Packer.
In January 2006, the Seven Network & Network Ten exercised their "first and last" rights agreement with the AFL to trump the Nine Network's $780 Million bid for broadcasting rights from season 2007-11. If Seven & Ten are unable to match the AFL's "quality of coverage" demands by May 5 2006 - better coverage into regional areas, northern states and on pay television, as promised in the Nine bid - the AFL are allowed to award the broadcasting rights back to Nine. Despite the deadline passing, no official announcement has occurred on whether or not the Seven/Ten consortium will obtain the rights as planned or whether or not they will revert to Nine/Foxtel.
Nine bases their summer schedule around broadcasts of cricket, for which it has owned the local broadcast rights since World Series Cricket in the late 1970s. Its cricket broadcasts in that era revolutionised the way the sport was covered, featuring camera placed at both ends of the field (after Packer famously complained about seeing "cricketer's bums" every second over), instant replays, and other innovations.
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