Kayo, Consent, and the Slow Death of Paying for Things

Someone posted recently about being asked to share their phone’s precise location just to watch sport they’d already paid for. Not approximate location. Not a suburb. GPS coordinates, essentially, handed over to a streaming company as the price of admission to content you’ve already purchased.

That landed with me.

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from paying for something and then being made to feel like a suspect. Kayo has refined this into an art form. You subscribe. You open the app. And then it starts negotiating with you about how much of yourself you have to give up before it will let you watch a footy match in your own lounge room. The QR code step is almost charming in how brazen it is. Yes, we have your credit card. Now we’d also like your location. On your phone. Always.

The location thing isn’t really about geo-blocking, or at least not entirely. It’s about data. Your location, cross-referenced with your viewing habits, cross-referenced with your device ID, is worth something to somebody. You are not just the customer. You know how the rest of that sentence goes.

What frustrates me is how normalised the erosion is. Each individual step seems small. Download the app. Log in again. Accept the new terms. Enable location. And by the time you’ve done all of it you’ve agreed to something you’d have flatly refused five years ago, but the frog has been in the pot long enough that it just feels like how streaming works now.

The pricing trajectory tells the same story. People in the comments were comparing what they’d paid years ago to the current $45 a month. That’s not inflation. That’s a company that acquired a captive audience through competitive pricing and is now extracting rent from it. The sports rights are locked up, the alternatives are limited, and they know it. So the price goes up and the UI gets worse and the ads multiply and they add a location permission, and what are you going to do, stop watching the footy?

Some people are doing exactly that. The piracy commentary in that thread was barely even coded. People were openly discussing VPNs and IPTV services and media servers with the casual energy of someone recommending a good mechanic. I don’t endorse it. I’ll also note that when a legitimate service treats paying customers like this, it is doing the marketing work for the alternative.

The thing I keep coming back to is the consent question. We have a Privacy Act in this country, though it has the enforcement energy of a strongly worded letter. Requiring precise location access as a condition of using a service you’ve paid for feels like it should be, at minimum, worth scrutinising. The ACCC has been making more noise lately about consumer protections in digital markets. Maybe something eventually moves. That’s not a confident prediction, just a hope.

The AFL and NRL content being paywalled is its own separate aggravation. These leagues receive public money, play in publicly funded stadiums, and benefit from decades of cultural investment by ordinary Australians. The idea that watching your team on a Saturday afternoon now requires a $45 monthly subscription is a genuine shift in who sport is actually for. I don’t think anyone made a conscious decision that this was acceptable. It just happened, incrementally, and now it’s the situation.

I still have a Kayo subscription. I’m aware that this somewhat undermines everything I’ve just written. The tension is real and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.