Confirmation Paper

Project Title:
Exploiting the entrepreneurial opportunities presented by a changing AFL television environment: Adopting a creative and innovative approach to television broadcasting.

Introduction
Television is changing. Shifting audience behaviour, new industry players, and ill-fitting government regulation complicates the landscape and threatens traditional commercial and Pay-TV business models. However, this represents an opportunity for the industry in terms of content creation, distribution, consumption, audience measurement, and revenue (Lotz, 2014, Burroughs and Rugg, 2014). Identifying and exploiting the opportunities that emerge during the transitioning to new business models may be realised by adopting an entrepreneurial mindset at both the production and consumption ends of the industry.
It is becoming widely accepted that entrepreneurialism provides the necessary skills for agents to be successful in the creative industries of the future (Davies and Sigthorsson, 2013, CIIC, 2013). Entrepreneurialism incorporates an “individual’s motivation and capacity” to be able to identify and pursue opportunities for economic gain (European Commission, 2003, p. 5). It requires the ability to adapt, and to blend innovation and creativity with sensible management, in order to add value and achieve success (Mazzarol, 2011). Television fulfils the criteria of a creative industry, and as such, research should investigate how this particular creative industry can benefit from entrepreneurialism.

Televised sport plays a dominant role in facilitating participation in a nation’s culture (Rowe, 2004), so much so that the Australian Government ensures that the broadcasting of “events of national importance and cultural significance”, such as the Melbourne Cup or the Australian Football League (AFL) Grand Final, remain “available to all Australians via free-to-air television” (Australian Government, 2010). The centrality of sport to Australian culture, and therefore to Australian citizenship and cultural inclusiveness, is difficult to overstate – in 2016, the top six most watched television programs on Free-to-Air television in Australia were sport related (Hickman, 2016). Given that the AFL is “the most powerful football code in the country” (Rowe, 2016, p. 11), making this code widely accessible to the people of our nation is evidently a necessary requirement for cultural participation.

Broadcasters that televise sport have traditionally relied on purchasing the broadcasting rights for elite sport to drive their business (Nicholson, 2007). The AFL recently sold its 2017-2022 broadcast rights for $2.5 billion – the largest amount ever paid for broadcasting rights in Australia (Mason & Stensholt, 2015). Most of this investment came from commercial and pay television operators, who generate revenue by selling advertising and subscriptions. In a context where television production, distribution and consumption is changing, this business model faces uncertainty.

Ambiguity also surrounds regulation. In Australia, the Broadcasting Act 1992 – which contains provisions that give free-to-air broadcasters a protected entitlement to purchase broadcasting rights to sports on the grounds of cultural significance – has not been adequately amended to account for social, industrial and technological developments that have punctuated the sector over the last 25 years (Hutchins and Rowe, 2012). Accordingly, adopting an entrepreneurial mindset and investigating incumbent and emerging industry players can reveal the tensions inside the sector, what the business model might look like in the future, and what any change means for cultural participation when it comes to the buying of sports rights.

We are simultaneously witnessing the rise of “collaborative, iterative, and user-led production of content by participants in a hybrid user-producer” role (Bruns, 2006, p. 1). This ‘produser’ is digitally literate, relatively affluent, better informed about industrial structures of production, and able to mobilise both resistance and promotion rapidly in a socially mediated, de-territorialized, and interconnected consumptive environment (Rowe and Hutchins, 2014). Brought into being by the forces of deregulation, commercialization, competition-driven innovation, globalisation, and conglomeration (among many others) (Curtin et al., 2014, p. 6-12, Nicholson, 2007, p. 200), the produser has shifted the power balance in their favour, as they demand more from content providers and distributors, pressuring them to improve existing content and delivery mechanisms (Hutchins, 2016). Moreover, as sport plays a significant role in the identity formation of the increasingly digitally literate fan (Rowe, 2016b), the active produser will explore unconventional ways of getting their sport content if they feel unfairly exploited by the industrial structures of production and distribution. Exploring the entrepreneurial mindset of produsers then, would appear to be the perfect way to understand the tensions and opportunities that exist in this often-neglected side of the television industry, and how those tensions and opportunities can shape the business models of the future.

An investigation into the tensions and opportunities that exist on both the consumptive and productive sides of television, and how the entrepreneurial mindset can exploit those tensions and opportunities, will be instructive for best business practices, the formation of government policy, future technological innovations and their adoption, and the meanings attached to the practice of consuming sport. Television has always been known for its innovation and responsiveness (Lotz, 2014, Rowe, 2004). An entrepreneurial mindset that is focused on exploiting contemporary tensions and opportunities is simply another iteration of this innovation and responsiveness, as it can provide us with the information needed to forge the tools of the television industry for the coming age.

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