Nine's Wide World of Sport - History

History

Wide World of Sports (WWoS) is a long-used title for Nine's sport programming. All sports broadcasts on Nine air under the WWoS brand. It was also the name of a popular sports magazine program that aired most Saturdays and Sundays. This program filled many of the summer daytime hours. The program premiered at 1:00 pm on Saturday, 23 May 1981, and was initially hosted by Mike Gibson and Ian Chappell, before being hosted in the 1990s by Max Walker and Ken Sutcliffe. Ian Maurice was the regular anchor at the WWOS Update Desk. The show ended in 1999, due in large part to the rise of Fox Sports (which Nine's owner owned half of) and other subscription sport channels., but the show returned in 2008 on Sunday mornings.

From the late 1970s, the main sport aired nationally under the WWoS brand was cricket. Nine's majority owner Kerry Packer created World Series Cricket in part because he couldn't obtain the rights to Australian test matches at home, even though he offered the Australian Cricket Board a $1.5 million 3 year contract which was rejected by the ACB who signed a 3 year deal with the ABC to broadcast test matches. This led to Packer signing in secret some of the world's best cricket players for a breakaway competition. The ACB and Nine then signed a truce after a long dispute in 1979, with Nine securing the exclusive rights to telecast Australian cricket.

From that point until 2006, Nine based its summer schedule around broadcasts of cricket internationally and domestic. Its cricket broadcasts in that era revolutionised the way the sport was covered, featuring cameras placed at both ends of the field (after Packer famously complained about seeing "cricketer's bums" every second over), instant replays, and other innovations. World Series Cricket made many other changes to cricket, having a huge impact on the game.

In 1984, Billy Birmingham (The Twelfth Man) released a best-selling comedy album making fun of the cricket portion of the show. He went on to release a series of albums ridiculing all aspects of Wide World of Sports, calling the show "Wired World of Sports". From the first to the most recent (2006), all have reached number one on the Australian album chart.

January 1995 saw the beginning of Premier Sports Network, the channel that was to become Fox Sports. It secured the rights to Australia's cricket tour of the West Indies, Nine's first challenge since winning its World Series war. Nine tried to stop the broadcast under Australia's 'anti-siphoning' rules, which exist to stop certain popular sporting events being screened exclusively on pay television. But it failed when Premier Sports Network came to an agreement to broadcast the tour free to air on Network 10.

WWoS's other main sport was and is rugby league. This was challenged in 1997 by the establishment of Super League, the repercussions of which led to Nine's parent company owning half of Fox Sports that year, and ultimately Nine's move away from popular live sport.

This partial purchase of Fox Sports roughly coincided with the end of Nine's traditional Saturday and Sunday daytime schedule of sports programming. What had once filled it now filled subscription channels, mainly Fox Sports. Old movies and other low rating programs filled much of the space.

Between the late 1970s and 1997, when Australians had wanted to watch continuous sport at home on a summer weekend, they had largely done so by tuning to Nine. Those in NSW, Queensland and the ACT did this all year round, due to rugby league's popularity in those areas. Now Fox Sports had that mantle, and gave viewers continuous sport all week long.

Nine acquired broadcast rights for Friday night and Sunday games in the Australian Football League, the elite Australian rules football competition in 2001. They shared the rights with Network Ten and Foxtel from 2002 through to 2006, but the deal assigned the rights for finals matches to Network Ten, a deal which reportedly flabbergasted Nine boss Kerry Packer.

As it also had the rights for all major swimming competitions until 2008, with major swimming competitions shown in primetime. During the early to mid-2000s, Nine for the first time had the FTA rights to the highest competitions of Australia's four biggest spectator sports: rugby league, Australian rules (shared with Ten), cricket and swimming. While Nine no longer had the volume of sport it once had, during the 2000-2006 period it dominated non-Olympic sport broadcasting in Australia.

In January 2006, the Seven Network and Network Ten exercised their "first and last" rights agreement with the AFL to trump the Nine Network's $780 million bid for broadcasting rights for the years 2007 to 2011. If Seven and Ten were 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 would have been allowed to award the broadcasting rights back to Nine. The Seven/Ten consortium, however, obtained the rights, with Nine broadcasting its last AFL match on a Sunday hosted by Tony Jones with a guest appearance from Nine's then chief executive and former AFL commentator Eddie McGuire.

From the beginning of the 2006-2007 cricket season, Nine no longer broadcasted Australian domestic cricket but replaced the coverage with ldelayed National Basketball League matches. The domestic cricket matches, long a mainstay of Nine's summer programming, moved exclusively to Fox Sports.

It was thought that the Seven Network would continue its tradition of airing the Olympic Games for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. However, Nine in joint partnership with Foxtel, has secured broadcasting rights which the network has described as the most comprehensive coverage of the Olympics. The partnership also won the rights to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

For more than 40 years, the Nine Network had also broadcasted the prestigious Wimbledon tennis tournament before ultimately dropping it after the 2010 tournament, citing declining ratings. The last Wimbledon match televised by Nine was the men's singles final played between Rafael Nadal and Tomáš Berdych, which Nadal won. The Seven Network have since picked up the broadcasting rights to Wimbledon, from 2011 onwards.