As a rugby league journalist and pundit, Roy Masters, formerly of The Sydney Morning Herald is without peer.

Alas for Roy, he also likes to dabble in AFL matters and he has been telling anyone who would listen for the past year that the AFL will likely struggle to get the $1 billion it was hoping for its next round of TV rights. In fact, according to Roy, a figure of around $800 million was a more likely outcome.

So Thursday turned out to be a great day for the AFL, but not so great for Roy. The actual amount announced by the AFL on Thursday through its deal with Seven, Foxtel and Telstra was a whopping $1.25 billion - a 50 per cent increase on the amount it earned between 2007 and this year and a lazy $450 million more than poor old Roy was out there touting.

It was a fantastic outcome for the AFL and easily the most lucrative sports rights deal ever in Australian TV history. The league was fortunate with its timing given that the economic downturn came and went during the life of the existing contract. Changes to the Federal Government's anti-siphoning legislation also came into effect at precisely the right time for the AFL and the ability to sell up to five games a week direct to pay-TV helped create a more competitive bidding market for the rights.

It will be interesting to see how consumers choose to watch games next year with Seven and Foxtel showing the same games at the same time. Would you stump for a Foxtel subscription just for the right to watch games without the ad breaks?

Perhaps people will. There is a lot of rubbish on the periphery of AFL football, but the on-field product (save for Thursday night's West Coast-Melbourne snoozefest) is superb. The most one-sided of the seven matches over the Easter weekend was Geelong's 19-point win over Hawthorn, but even that game was in doubt until late. Crowds and ratings would suggest that clearly, it is the no.1 spectator sport in the country.

It leaves others in its wake and now those others need to sort out their own TV arrangements going forward. The NRL contract with Channel Nine and Fox Sports expires at the end of 2012 and the new agreement will be one of the first agenda items of the soon-to-be-finalised NRL Commission.

Hopefully, the NRL will see the value of splitting up its rights rather than handing them to Nine in one contract. State of Origin should have its own agreement, Friday night matches and Monday night matches should also stand alone.
It was interesting to hear Seven CEO David Leckie say at the media conference that his network had enough money left in the bank to mount a bid for the NRL. Ten, whose future as an AFL broadcaster is looking shakier by the week, is thought to be serious about buying the Monday night rights.

The irony there is that the new head of sport for Ten is David Barham, the former head of AFL Films, who moved to Sydney at the start of the year. Is rugby league ready for the five-minute warning?