Participant Observations 2/11/20 - Free-to-Air Experiment Results

 At the start of the 2020 AFL season, I cancelled my Kayo subscription. The reason for doing this was to see if and how my viewership of AFL would change over the course of a season with no pay television coverage, meaning I relied only on free content to get information about the league.

On reflection, I had the following observations:

• I miss AFL360 the most. This is clearly the best news source for AFL on television. Obviously I also missed a lot of the other pay-television content, such as Open Mike, and some of the other shoulder content. But 360 is finger-on-the-pulse stuff.
• In it's absence, I relied most heavily on Footy Classified on Channel 9. This was the preferred replacement because it is on twice a week, and features Caroline Wilson, Eddie McGuide, and Craig Hutcheson. While I detest Craig and Eddie as people, they are really informative. I also grew appreciation for Matt Lloyd and Ross Lyon, the other regulars on the show.
• I noticed a small uptick in watching The Front Bar, but not much. I probably should have watched this more. It's like the Before the Bounce, a show on Channel 10 that I used to love. It's easily the funniest AFL show on television. I think I normally had other stuff on Thursday night I was doing.
• I also watched highlights packages on YouTube way more. These highlights packages - about 6-9 minutes long, would be available on the platform normally about 12 hours after the game. It didn't give a huge oversight of the games that were on pay television that I didn't see, but you could see how the game unfolded, who might have played well etc, as the highlights often included key moments and injuries, etc.
• I didn't watch much Channel 7 coverage at all. I think they cancelled Talking Footy or their regular panel show early in the season, and their other coverage didn't reach me. However, obviously I watched more of their pre- and post-game coverage, although thankfully, there was no Roaming Brian this year, because of quarantine conditions around players.
• My overall online consumption probably increased marginally. I probably paid more attention to my own clubs websites, and the AFL app as well, although the app is not very good.

On the whole, I definitely did not get the quality or quantity of information that I did last year, but the quality of coverage on pay television may not have been as good this year either, because of all the hurdles that COVID-19 put on everything. For example, on the rare occasions when I did get to see 360 coverage, the guests usually appeared via Zoom, so the experience of watching may not have been as rich this year.