Free sports including AFL and cricket driving huge growth in linear streaming on 7plus

Seven Network’s streaming platform 7plus notched up a 62 per cent increase in linear streaming in the 12 months to June 2025, an achievement made in large part thanks to sport.

Sports including the AFL and the cricket were made available to stream for free for the first time in Australia, bringing new audiences to the platform.

“Free sports brings Australians together,” Gereurd Roberts, group managing director at Seven Digital, told The Nightly.

Seven’s upfronts presentation of its 2026 programming slate confirmed the AFL, AFLW, Test cricket, the men’s and women’s Big Bash League, Women’s International Cricket, Supercars and more will continue to be the backbone of that sports pillar.

For next year, there will also be the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, as well as the addition of the Rugby League World Cup’s 2026 tournament, for which Seven has secured broadcast and digital rights.

It will kick off with a match between Australia and New Zealand in Sydney, and run for a month across 18 men’s, 15 women’s and 20 wheelchair games.

Angus Ross, group managing director, Seven Television, said that Australia was becoming an outlier in how free-to-air channels are able to grow audiences.

“The big difference in this market is that us and Nine, in particular, invest very heavily in sport and news as well as entertainment programming,” he said. “We like to say in terms of retention of audiences, there are two certainties in broadcast TV, and that is sport and news.

“They have amazingly consistent audiences. The entertainment programs come and go, their audiences can be up and down, and thankfully, most of our tentpoles are growing, but you can lock in the performance of news and sport.”

The executive team was keen to emphasise the success story of 7plus over the previous financial year. In addition to the 62 per cent growth in linear streaming, the platform’s video-on-demand viewing rose 21 per cent.

It clocked 1.4 million new user registrations while daily active user were, on average, up 31 per cent year-on-year. Time spent grew 13 per cent.

The AFL Finals Series alone accounted for 171,000 new user registrations.

Roberts said that contrary to popular assumptions, those new 7plus audiences were not cannibalising broadcast viewers. “The audiences are growing across the board. It’s really important to challenge that people think it’s instead of broadcast, it’s not.

“We’re just finding new audiences. People who may not have had a relationship with Seven previously who are coming in (and are) younger. The 7plus audience is demonstrably younger than the broadcast audience.

“Which doesn’t make it better or worse, it just makes it different. So, we’re actually extending our demographic reach, and that’s really important.

“We’re now reaching a million people a day on 7plus.”

Sport and news may be driving a lot of that growth, which continues in the 2026 financial year (according to Roberts, the live streaming increase to date is 84 per cent), it is also where the network plays with its scripted dramas and comedies.

“The biggest program on 7plus is Home and Away, so there’s a massive amount of viewers that are watching it live (streamed) and also watching it on demand,” Ross said.

“They’re predisposed to consume drama. That’s what they’re interested in, and that’s why drama on our platform over-indexes.”

Other scripted offerings that “did amazing” included Ludwig, the British crime drama-comedy starring David Mitchell as a puzzlemaker who impersonated his twin brother to solve cases for a police department.

Ross was clearly a fan. He said, “It wasn’t your standard, run-of-the-mill dark UK drama, it had an amazing cast, it was funny, had great writing, and it was lovingly produced.”

Ludwig will return with a second season on 7plus, tentatively scheduled for later in 2026.

Also returning is The Hunting Party, an American crime procedural that features the chase for escaped convicts from a secret prison that isn’t supposed to exist.

The jewel in that scripted slate is The Rookie, the very popular cop show starring Nathan Fillion as a middle-aged man who joined the Los Angeles Police Department later in life. The series has now run seven seasons and 7plus has the first-run rights to any new episodes.

“It’s one of those shows that keeps working 24 hours a day, for years and years, and people still go back and we’ve got all seven seasons. People will find it for the first time and go back and start watching,” Ross said.

Roberts added, “It’s an awesome demonstration of how we’re not just an overnights business anymore. The overnights business is still really powerful, and, again, you want to find a million people at 6pm every night, then the news is there.

“But even still, you can have someone who can watch an episode of The Rookie and then go back seven seasons, and (we) see hundreds of thousands of people every single year going back to season one. So, it’s not once that episode has aired, it’s dead and gone.

“It doesn’t stop working, it’s an amazing acquisition.”

The platform will add 6000 more hours to the library this year, which includes favourites and acclaimed series such as Deadwood, The Good Wife and Murder at the End of the World.

7plus will also have all the shows the TV network announced for its 2026 broadcast slate, including returning seasons of The Voice, Australian Idol, Farmer Wants a Wife, The Chase Australia, The 1% Club, Better Homes and Gardens and My Kitchen Rules.

Newcomers to the fold include an unnamed Mick Molloy comedy series, an expansion of SAS which pits contestants from Australia and the UK against each other, two music documentaries – one about Tina Arena and the other on Mental As Anything – and the two previously announced Chris Brown-fronted My Reno Rules and Once in a Lifetime.