How TVNZ won the Fifa World Cup

The Spin-Off Podcast Network Kia ora, I'm Duncan Grieve and you're listening to the Fold. Every week on this show we talk about the rapidly shifting media landscape and in 2026 it's intensified. With AI platforms now redirecting traffic away from newsrooms and more ad dollars than ever heading offshore, the old model is essentially broken. Two years ago your support saved the spin-off, but the landscape remains profoundly challenging. To stay sustainable and keep our journalism free for everyone, we need to find 5,000 new members by year's end. If you value our work covering stories that shape our tearoa, please join us at thespinoff.co.nz/members or follow the link in the show notes. Your support is the reason we're still here. It's really easy to do an internet search and see when certain sports rights come up in this market. It's a line up with our sports strategy which is bigger than that Kiwi's really care about. Sports that are more digital friendly are ones that we like. No, my Hoki-Mai, Kia, the Fold, M&H, Nek, Kua, Duncan Grieve, Talk, Blwing, Wa. My guest today is Melody Robinson. Someone I've known a while and one of the best hangs in New Zealand media. She's also got one of the most impressive career acts. Mel was a multi-world cup winning black fern during a period when that was a completely indomitable team. She moved into sports journalism at a time when the opportunities for Wahini and Māori were vanishingly rare. Then forged a path into leadership first with an MBA from the University of Auckland and then corporate roles with Skye and then TVNZ where she's run sports in various capacities. TVNZ is kind of dialed up its coverage and if you remember like 10 years ago, sports billy existed at TVNZ and it totally dropped it. It had the gift of the SPARK sport rights on some level falling into its life but it's what you do with it and how seriously it takes it now. And that kind of all culminated in the FIFA World Cup which was a global success story and every broadcaster who took it up I think is probably very pleased with their decision-making but I think it was particularly impressive for TVNZ. Some of the stats that Mel will talk about are quite extraordinary in terms of the growth that they represent in terms of what a single tournament has produced for them in terms of numbers. So we dig a lot into that, into the role sports we'll play. Mel is also on the board of World Rugby globally so we kind of take these little detours into talking about rugby as a product. She's very unflinching in her critics there and very complimentary about the NRL. We'll get a little bit of a view into how close TVNZ got to those rights which ultimately went to Skye. And we also talk about this new role that she's just signed on to do as a global sports industry specialist for Amazon Web Services which is a, you know, musk and fast when I read that title it was like that sounds amazing, I don't know what it means. So she explains what it means, it's quite an extraordinary job. A very, very senior, very influential part of the way that data and sort of streaming services and the cloud and the distribution opportunities that flow out of that for sports organisations and right at the bleeding edge of it, you know, and with some of the biggest sports organisations in the world. It's an amazing job and maybe I'll have her back on in a year or two to try and kind of get a sense of how that's gone. But most of the meat of this conversation is about the World Cup, a total triumph for TVNZ, the introduction of the, I said on the podcast that was the first audience revenue. I'm not sure that's true, I'm pretty sure that Jason Paris when he was at TVNZ talked about doing paper, download shortland street episodes in like the early 2010s. But I would wager that they made a lot more out of this tournament pass for the World Cup. This is a really fun episode, I'm so glad to have had Mel on the fold and I don't, I just get into it now. Kia ora Melody, welcome back to the folds. Thank you, it's great to be here. So good to have you back and congratulations on a new role, that's super exciting. I'm amt, it's going to be a challenge and one of my main goals in that role is to make sure I don't get a divorce. It's just a good goal to have, mostly the time in my situations and I believe in you. It's just that I'll be over there for a little bit setting up first so it's hard, it's hard when you leave your family behind. It is, but they're coming over right? Yeah, at some point. Well, I'm not sure if my teenage boys want to, we'll see. What, whereabouts will you be based? New York Manhattan. Oh and they did this not really into that? No, it was a totally boring name of a being here. You wait. We'll talk more about that towards the end, but before then I want to talk about the World Cup, it's just, yeah right now as we record this it's a few days old. Can you kind of break down its performance for TV NZ, yeah, for us? Well, I think the public release talked about the 20 million streams in a third of Kiwis. I think the key comparison which might make that 20 million significant is that when we launched our TV NZ+ Sport Hub a few three years ago, over a year when we got all 18 of those back sports, including cricket, we hit seven million streams. So in six in a bit weeks, 20 million, that's unbelievable. It shows you the transition from linear traditional broadcast through to digital, that's the first thing, and the fantastic job that TV NZ+ has done, and curation, and accessibility to promote that product. So that's big. And we broke our all-time concurrent streaming records as well. Now we can't prove it, but we think it's the biggest streaming audience that New Zealand's ever had, and it was for the final, that we kept breaking it with, you know, our football team, our whites then again and again, and then an England one, and then the final. So we thought that the whole platform was going to break, but luckily it didn't. How about that? I mean, so I was kind of wondering about that, right? You picked a pretty serious sporting event to test. What is a still a very new platform? Yes. So that must be a relief to everyone in that, all those teams that it survived it. Oh, there was still some stress moments I can tell you, and it's weird, we have a bit of a habit of signing up some kind of big deal before we've got any of the organisation, the infrastructure, or anything in place, and it kind of, it's a TVNC sort of cultural thing. It spurs us all into motion, and we do things that you usually just can't do, like to launch an OTT platform and a pay product, such a short amount of time without being a tech company is super impressive. So when did, like, can you just talk us through in a bit of detail, like all those pieces? Because I do think it is an incredible achievement, because it's not a, you know, like it's, it's quite a singular product and, suddenly in this market, to have it as a sort of a one-off pass that sits alongside a freely accessible streaming platform. And I've creeped me if I'm wrong, but the right, even the right transaction was relative, like you've got 2030 now, but you didn't get 2026 until relatively recently, is that correct? Yeah, I think we confirmed that maybe about nine months ago. Yeah, really, really quick turnaround. And, you know, without wanting to get into whatever the sort of internal goals were, and, you know, can you talk a bit about that, the tournament pass itself and, you know, how, you know, it's again, you could have done this with a much smaller piece of rights just to kind of test it, but you just picked the biggest sort of sporting events in the world, really, to try it. Basically, I think we learnt from our partnership with Spark Sport back in 2019, Robby World Cup, where we saw what it did for their platform in terms of subscribers. Obviously, the tech wasn't quite ready then. So we had it in the back of our minds, particularly we had a great experience with America's Cup on Friday year, but with our simulcast as well, which I think hit well over three million streams as well on that, the Olympics when we had our sub-license in Paris with Sky TV. The data just shows you what a big sport product can do. And to be honest, if we're going to launch a new platform and a pay product, you'd want to do it with a big one, because why would you, how do you justify the investment, unless you're going to launch it with one of the biggest products in the world. - Yeah, that's still, that's a big bowl sport. - It is, it is, right? Well, I think you've proved that. And in terms of the audience revenue piece for TVNZ, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the first time you've ever had a direct to consumer revenue. - Yes, yeah, we've had a bit of that digital journey that we have, we've got some really nifty, digital products for advertising partners. Like, activates one where we have an AWS cleanroom where you can put our customer data there and track the conversion. This is the first time that we have basically monetised that incredible first party data that we've gathered over the years. We've got well over 2 million first party data records as part of TVNZ+ so this is the first time we've done it. That's why I guess we say this is the most significant step change for us as a business, particularly when you know that advertising revenue, you've been talking about it for years, is dropping every year broadcast TV, you know, we've held up in many places, TVNZ one still doing well, some of our big entertainment and news and sport still brings in the money on Friday air, but the only way we could firstly get a new revenue stream and also buy big sports is to move into event pass. - So is there, you know, obviously, 2030's been announced, but I do want to dig more into the world cup, but has this kind of created an internal license to go after events and is it more, is there a kind of like, because this was a time-bound one-off event, is that more what you'll be targeting, given the sort of nature of the proof point you have as opposed to ongoing, you know, effectively like monthly subscriptions? - Yeah, at the moment, there's a plan to, I guess we go from moments to habits to relationships, that's our pay strategy and at the moment, it is just the event passes. It's actually quite a different proposition from an esfod with all the time on sports. That is a very difficult place to try and compete with a company like Sky TV where there's barriers to entry when it comes to the commercial selling and pubs. They've got a huge amount of data that they already know what they, how they can price it up. They've got the relationships, I mean, they won the NRL deal off the back of having that relationship for quite some time. Amongst other things as well, of course, a big rights fee. So for now, we've got the data around bigger event passes and actually it's quite different from the data, I think Sky TV has. They can't pick off at the moment, probably, and say exactly how many subscribers would bring into an esfod off say a fee for football will cut. We now know that. - Right, yeah, that's very true. Just quickly on the NRL, there was conjecture in-- - Is that on your question, question, lust, Duncan? - It is, yeah. I'm just bringing it up. (laughing) How serious was the TV NZ look at that? - We wanna be New Zealand's number one streamer and news entertainment in sport. So that's Signan Lane, that sport is important as the other two. So we will have a crack for bigger rights that makes sense in the NRL is one of the best sports rights you can buy in this market. - Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'd love to get your view, 'cause obviously you've been around sports from a journalism broadcast and now executive level for a long long time. Yeah, this is kind of off-piece, but it's sort of really been fascinating watching the way that the NRL, particularly in the last few years, obviously we've got a very particular view because the Warriors have been so well executed as a team, but it does feel like the way, part of why it feels like the most vibrant competition in this part of the world is just how sort of focused is and how the coverage around it and the way that it encourages relationships with sort of non-right-tolding partners. It just has this vitality that rugby still sort of seems to struggle to execute against. Now you're into my other major passion topic of all, which is sport business models. Look, I think you can look at the NRL. You see a very powerful chairman at the top who makes a lot of decisions and a very good CEO and Abdo and they have clubs that also run by owners that agile, they can change their rules, they can change the broadcast product, they have already a massive group of super fans, they've changed, I guess, the brand and perception of the game, so that's more inclusive and the women's NRL is a big part to play there and more importantly to me, the fan engagement, that's where they are super good. They use their first party data across the clubs and also NRL to really talk to communicate and sell in a cycle to all of those fans. And then when you go to a game, it's a great time. I mean, honestly, the halftime shows, the atmosphere, they're loud and they're getting the kids because again, multi-platform media distribution, looser than a lot of the big traditional rights and do a big broadcast deal in the US, for instance, were CNN, they've got very strict rights around what clip rights remain with the rights holder, the NRL and not like that, they just spread the love around, much like the NBA do. Yeah, it is quite striking, you know, you've got the way that the centralisation versus the privatisation feels like very well managed, the evolution of rules year on year. And even, and especially that, the clip rights, that feels like a free-for-all and that sort of culture, the way that YouTube drives and other social platforms drive, engagement is massive. The other thing, I just went to the all-wix on the weekend and it is so striking that the atmosphere, like the all-wix, obviously that's an amazing on-field product, but you contrast that with like watching an NRL game and seeing like the Joker and the signs and just the whole kind of energy that emanates from the crowd and how much the crowd feels like part of the game versus it rugby, it is this kind of very intense sort of monolith and that's a hard thing to change around and I think rugby is working on it's game day experience, but you do sense that why it feels like one side is in moving faster than the other. Well, you know, in the US, most stadiums are high-tech and as a fan you walk in there and you get super served everything. I was at Eden Park on Saturday as well as with my son and his bestie. It was enjoyable, but you've got to work to find the food. You've got to work to find your seat. You don't get any personal messages on your app, on your phone, you don't feel loved. And as much as I remember, I love rugby and I'm on the World Rugby Board and there's some good stuff happening in that space, but we do need to get better. We say that we care about the fan, we see evidence. Yeah, yeah. Kia ora, I'm Duncan Grieve and you're listening to the fold. Every week on this show, we talk about the rapidly shifting media landscape. And in 2026, it's intensified. With AI platforms now redirecting traffic away from newsrooms and more ad dollars than ever heading off shore, the old model is essentially broken. Two years ago, your support saved the spin-off, but the landscape remains profoundly challenging. So let's get back to the FIFA World Cup because it wasn't amazing. I sort of, I've got, I'm sure, like a lot of people listening, I'm sure, like you, in a bunch of WhatsApp chats with various kinds of friends who are sports fans. And I don't think I've ever seen a tournament just kind of, and these are friends of mine who live all over the world, just kind of unify and kind of take over attention in a way that this tournament did. What, given your, you know, that you've got this governance experience, this executive experience, and obviously close observation of different sports leagues, why do you think it had that impact, which obviously radiated out to New Zealand, to TVNZ saw that in those astounding viewership numbers? I will first say they've got the money to invest. So if I looked at the suit, they had available to the host broadcasters. They had data feeds, they had animated feeds, they had a feed where you could pop yourself into an avatar and be watching the live game from any point of that stadium. There's just so many different things they offer, even little things like the water break. I'm not sure if the teams necessarily liked those in the end. They actually need them every time. Yeah, because you know, and also it might have changed momentum. But every single high-performance team agreed to it and particularly they had the concern about the temperatures. But what that meant for broadcasters is that we could add extra ads in. It's billions of dollars, right? Billions of dollars. So there's all these little things. Then it truly is an international game because they put a lot of that money into developing more countries, more teams, and just throwing the sport out there. And we ended up, I mean, I didn't think that it would be that close with the extra teams. Everyone was surprised with that. And then some of those other teams that came in had storylines. Then you had the big stars with the storylines who performed. I mean, it was every part. It's a perfect storm, yeah. But that's not an accident. That is not a standard fact that the feed was an incredibly complex organisation. And you know what we. I went to the FIFA draw in Washington. I was quite close to Donald Trump, by the way. And even in the girls' bathroom, like the toilet paper and the Soviet things had gold FIFA 2026 all over it. And so I sent a WhatsApp to the World Rugby Board and said, can we have these for 2027? That's not going to happen. [laughter] Yeah, it just that there's money and then there's FIFA money. Oh, look, absolutely. And that is a big difference. But they do have capability within that organisation and the people they hire who are the world's best at what they do. So, yeah. And again, you can feel that. And even what you describe as a broadcaster in terms of all of that piece, that's all value that can be unlocked. Can you talk to a bit of what. When you buy the rights to stream and broadcast, how much? And because obviously the notorious also for the amount of. The way that different aspects of the commercial parts are kind of packaged and sold off and therefore walled off from competitors and so on. And how restricted or open are you in terms of. You've got this great daddy, you've got this great product, in terms of unlocking that in the local market as a broadcaster. In the local market, it's really good. It's really restrictive on you if you don't live up to any of the obligations. You've got to be really careful about your geo-bocking. Yeah, I write experience that even be ending in. No, that's right, we emptied that up by the way. We did, we had to because that was part of the contract. So, yeah, I think they've been fantastic to deal with. I think that it was more simple than some of the other deals we've had. The big contracts. But really professional ones. So, of those 20 million streams, it is a staggering number. Do you have you broken down or can you break down what proportion came through tournament pass? Because there was a relatively small number of the 100-pice games that were freely accessible. Can you give me a sense of what the ratio was? There was a large percentage of reach was driven from free to year. But all of the engagement came from the paid pass in terms of those streams. So, while we, I guess we captured a big part of the nation through our free proposition and brought the men. It brought the men to engage on the platform. So, that's where we got all of our really, really good engagement and conversion. Will you be releasing the number of passers-sold? No. Because then, you can work out how much you're looking for it out for the next rise. Absolutely not. That's fair. Yeah, I could have a crack. So, what about, again, I totally understand and respect the, as you said, the big bulls bet that was going with the biggest tournament in the world to start with. But there is a sort of concurrent thing, which is the next thing that always can't help but be smaller. What else are you looking at in that kind of time-bound tournament space? What else profiles are, like it's interesting to you? But in terms of what we look at, it has to line up with our sports strategy, which is big events that Kiwi's really care about. We usually want them in our own time zone. And usually they have to have a Kiwi team or a Kiwi interest in it. We like events that bring in male and young audiences. And we like to create entertainment events as well. Yes, the other piece which comes into it with our digital first strategy is sports that are more digital friendly. Are ones that we like as well. And football is one of those. And I think that's because way back when the EPL rights were brought by. Premier League pass. And so, yes. And so suddenly we had all these football fans in this country trying to work out how to stream. Then it went to Ben, then back to Sky. So they're used to moving around to follow the ball. They are digital savvy. Interesting. In Euros, we had Euros 2, 2024. And when we saw the audience result from that, even though that was free, we were like, "Okay, this is a digital first sport." But it is too, by the way. Right, because it's moved around so much. So if it's sat with Sky for a long time, the audience hasn't been trained to go get it. We went to Spark Sport. That's where a big chunk decided to give that a crack streaming as well. But cricket has been in summer. And also been a very long sport in terms of ours. People will move around. They'll have it on their mobile in summer. We get massive streams. We have had massive streams over summer with people just having it on their phone if they're on the beach or if they're out. So that is a really good digital first property. So the only kind of, obviously this was an overwhelmingly positive story for TVNZ. The only kind of nitpicking I've seen came in a. In coverage of the fact that the. I think it was 17 minutes on TVNZ, on one news, sorry, before the acknowledgement of Ryan Fox's extraordinary win. Really unfortunate timing. But when he became the champion golfer, now what. What's your view on it? Because obviously golfer sport close to a house. Well, you're my husband, coach, is a mid-he was with him. So it was quite a big. It was the final of FIFA. Ryan won. Just before, right? Like in 90 minutes before. I've gotten up at 1.15. You watched the whole round? I went to the FIFA game at TVNZ. Well, of course I'll be biased and say British Open is massive. But look, it's one of those things. FIFA is our product. Our news team had covered it the entire way. It's not like it's a. Yeah. Not a legitimate story. No, it's a secret story. And why should have led? Like it's the World Cup Final. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's one of those things and I'll make it up to Ryan later. I think he's probably fine. Yeah. Yeah. He's probably a pretty state. He also seems quite lazy going, guys. Doesn't look like he bruises easily. He's a genuinely fantastic guy. And in fact, the memes that came out from the Aussies this week, kind of fit him perfectly, because he is very laid back. He loves his meat. He's a great barbecue guy. And he's also an excellent fisherman. And that's when he said it's happier. He can just put something in his fish biting on the end of his line. I mean, given this state as some of the elite golfers, they're kind of personalities and they're in difference to just about anything that's not themselves. He seems like a pretty. Like the sport should be very grateful. Well, you know, with any New Zealanders around their performing, they better be humble, because that's pretty much out your mouth. Otherwise, the other way, the audiences having a few cracks. That's right. That's right. Okay, so you've kept this triumph. Yeah, been with TV and sad running sports for quite some time. Is this as good as it's got? Yes, yes. There have been a couple of massive milestones in the TV and Z+ sport hub was one of them, because that allowed us to bid for rights that were multi-stream, and we couldn't do that before. What did it define multi-stream? So if you have, say, for instance, the Australian Open, and you've got 16 streams or 16 courts operating at the same time, if you are on a traditional broadcast channel with a streaming platform that's probably. You'll count to however many, yeah, right? You can't cover all the courts. That allowed us to start bidding and thinking about those types of sports, and then pay is another level up, so that is definitely probably one of the highlights, or the highlight of working at TV and Z for sure, is launching that with everybody else, and big collaborative effort for sure. Was it a hard conversation with the board, and was having John fillet there, sort of helpful for our kind of convincing everyone to take the steep breath and buy this huge amount? Actually, our previous chair was brave, pushed it, Alistair, grothers, and he was 100% on board. Yeah. In fact, he can take some credit too, because when you've got a chair who is fully into, well, sports and taking a small risk, then. Small risk. Yeah, small risk. (LAUGHS) That's called high-risk appetite, isn't it? Yeah. Who wants low-risk appetite? I just think that with media nowadays, if you. You can know how the story ends by just not taking any risks, and sort of eke out whatever you have for as long as possible, but you know how it ends. But if you don't take a big swing every now and then. Yes. you've got no chance of avoiding that fate. And yeah, good, good on TV and Z and you for bringing it off. Now, you are also, I think, like, two months, maybe three months away from taking up just a completely wild job. Tell us what the title is and what you'll actually be doing, because I think, you know, I read the title and I was like, "That sounds amazing, but what are your systems engineer now that's going on?" I know. Global sports industry specialist, and it's for AWS, which is Amazon Web Services. They are the cloud technology business that, I guess, drive sports. A lot of the sport engagement, the fan engagement, the digital platforms are archived, the data. So especially they have us sports experts to come in, talk to sports. So organizations find out what problems they need to solve, and then work across AWS teams to solve them. So, you know, TV and Z+, back end is AWS Cloudfront. I've had a bit of exposure, particularly around fan engagement stuff, digital platform, all of that. And the data parts really exciting, because that's my high performance background too. So I've got a couple of really good ideas, like, for instance, how do we solve the TMO issue with deep machine learning tools? When you say the TMO issue, do you mean the sort of the pace of it? Yes. Because it's crazy what we're seeing, where, like, conversions are taking, they're about to kick off again and we're sort of hauled back. It just, from a product point of view, that's a bit more. Well, that can be solved. Well, what is driving that? Because that feels, like, completely insane. Every fan I know is just completely bemused by that. It's a really difficult one to answer, because I guess the most important thing is play a welfare and making sure that they're safe, and particularly if you think about the tort law in different countries, and a lot of the cases that have been brought against some organizations. Really talking about the. Yeah, concussion, etc. So the modern sport organisation has to do everything they can to look after the players. So that's the first thing. And then second thing is the laws are extremely complex, and there's a lot of interpretation. And the interpretation can change year in and year out. And it depends on the philosophy of, you know, what comes from shape at the game, from World Rugby. And you might have noticed with Nations Cup there's speedier. It seems to be more pacy, and the referees are making more decisions themselves on the field. Obviously, the second test, Italy, all blacks. He didn't get some of them right, but in the ends they were corrected by his team, and that was okay, but it meant extra time. Yeah. And it on, which was a little unfortunate. So it's hard. It's going to be an area that will be difficult, but you could just feed the law book into a deep machine and then tall. We could have a production tool. There's a machine, a sorry, a vision tool that can adjust and give the referees the judgements within a split second. So there are ways to speed that up and then throw out some of the explanations and the rules straight directly to fans as well to take away some of that confusion. That's fascinating. And one quick thing, because you mentioned archive, this is like a bug bear, or it feels like an opportunity that's always set there for me, but maybe this is just me, and I'm just like taking this privileged opportunity that I have with you. But sporting archives feel really poorly surfaced and served to me. And yet there's this kind of perennial fascination, the stalegear kind of, obviously there's an archiving function that is just having access to it, but there's also the surfacing part. Are there sports? In NASCAR and Formula One. Right. Yeah, and all driven by Cloud Tech. Yes, NASCAR and particular ZWS. And if you're a producer and you're looking for a piece of archive, or you've got to put it in manually to try and save it in your archive, there are tools now that do it for NASCAR, and then they can serve those through to the fans as well who are on the app. Because that's where the opportunity feels like to me, like we're in the NBA off season now, and if there are a way of kind of having kind of just surfacing kind of classic games, giving a little bit of context around, I think you just make it a 365 day league, or at least a product, league pass, I mean, in a way that it just really doesn't even feel like it's formatted for that. And you know that it's there, it's just. Well that's, I mean, you know, drive to survive, got all the credit, but Formula One started feeding the archive footage of Michael Schumacher's, he had to send us to all the new young fans that come on board, and that just captured them and made that engagement even greater. And so they started to see some of the history from the clips of archive, which is exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, and that's ultimately what, you know, you only understand the stakes now if you understand the history behind it. This was so fun. Great. Really good to see you again, and congratulations to you and everyone at TV and to a total triumph with the World Cup, and really excited for you to just take all that you've learned and to see what happens with your AWS. The spin-off podcast network.