Healthy sport consumption : moving away from pies and beer

Some Australian sports teams are struggling to encourage an increasingly sedentary population to attend live events, while the amount of sport available on television and via the Internet is rising. For example, in 2016 Australia’s Channel 7 (a free-to-air broadcaster) aired 3,000 hours of Olympic content across three mainstream television stations and live-streams through the 7 Olympics app. In June 2016, Fox Sports (a subscription television service owned by News Corp Australia) delivered round-the-clock coverage of Wimbledon and offered 12 sport channels, providing 24/7 sports coverage – with one channel dedicated to rugby league. Fans in Australia (and elsewhere) can now watch sport on television at any time of the day or night, and stream sport endlessly on their mobile devices. The struggle to encourage spectators to attend sporting venues is also compounded by negative factors such as poor quality, high priced food and beverages at the stadium. The high prices at some Australian venues have resulted in concerns that watching sport at stadiums may no longer be affordable for ‘the common person’, particularly those with families (Sutton, 2017).