This transcript has been lightly edited by AI
Sean: So there's a few things there. I mean, creating NZR+, which is the first thing, it's a free streaming platform, which is sort of the opposite of a lot of the other building out your streamers and, it's going to be a revenue builder. Was it primarily that growth message? And then obviously, the geek and the data geek inside me also goes, well, there's a data piece there and you're starting to get better information on some of those audiences. But it really sort of generated from a growth position and looking to grow audiences both in New Zealand, but more likely internationally.
Andy Burt: Yeah, absolutely. So definitely a growth proposition. And you know, the data, of course, is an important aspect of that. And perhaps, as we grow bigger and bigger, that will become even more important. But at the outset, it's purely a growth mechanism. So New Zealand has a population of five million people. It's a number one sport here. But if we look at rugby globally, according to the IOC, there's 500 million people identify as rugby fans. So it's 495 million people outside of New Zealand. And when you look at the All Blacks and Black Ferns being the biggest brand in the game, it's a huge opportunity for us to capture a lot of those audiences. And we thought the best way to do it was to build this free platform and provide great free content to the world and really grow the sport globally.
Andy Burt: And the other thing we're doing at NZR+ is we're taking rugby to dark markets around the world for free. So that's markets around the world that don't have a broadcast deal. And we're talking some pretty big markets, India, for example, Sri Lanka, China, Portugal, Netherlands. So if they don't have a broadcast deal for say Super Rugby, we're reaching our finals this weekend or All Blacks Test Matches, we'll take it to those markets for free. So that's we're just introducing rugby to more and more people around the world. We want to grow fandom in this game. We see a huge opportunity to really capture that. You know, there's 500 million people around the world that identify as fans to bring them into the tent. And also not only that, I'm sure there's more fans out there to be discovered of this great game of rugby.
Sean: And from an initial build point of view, how much of it was archive content that you had and was a bit of an aggregator and tagging and all those things. So it has this, it's similar to why Disney created Disney Plus. They had a whole back catalog and that's why a lot of people, but then the thing is to also be producing new content to drive people in. How do you sort of keep that cadence going?
Andy Burt: Yeah, and it's a real mix of both. I think in terms of archive, that's such a strong piece. And we've got a partner actually based in Melbourne where you live, Inverley, who we work with. So they've got access to our archive and we produced a whole bunch of base content to fill out the platform. So things like we'll create short films on moments in time. In 1992, the All Blacks played a centenary series against the World 15. Now this was a three test series involved all the greatest players from around the world.
And that series hadn't seen the light of day since 1992. It was on free to air TV in New Zealand and never been screened since then it's been locked away in an archive. So we got a hold of those three games. We produce a documentary on that. There's a great piece of archival content for the platform. They've been running through our highlight packages over the course of 30 plus years, creating various packages. We've got ex-players sitting down in a room interviewing them about moments in time. So basically it's a whole big archival project, which has filled out about a hundred hours of just archival content alone.
Remixed archive, which fans haven't seen for many years fills out the platform. And then on top of that, we've got what we'd call premium original content where we've, last year being a World Cup year as well, of course, a lot of this was World Cup focused, but we've got someone like Taika Waititi who is a Hollywood director, rugby fan himself, former rugby player. We got him to travel throughout France and do Taika's rugby road trip throughout France. And we put that on the platform. So really have a big pull to go beyond rugby.
And reach a much wider audience, which Taika does. We had our All Blacks and Black Ferns behind the scenes documentaries. We have Richie McCaw sit down with Thierry Dusautoir, who is the former French legend. They sat down and talked about France versus All Blacks. Things like that. So we really fill it out with our premium original content, balanced out with our archival content. And also beyond that, we just pulled in a whole bunch of licensed content. Things like rugby adjacent content.
Kids content, reality shows which feature rugby elements, all this type of stuff, just to really provide a great variety of content for audiences. So it doesn't matter if you're a rugby fan or not, we've got content on there that will appeal to anyone globally.
