Sports Flick review

While clearly not as well funded as competing sports streaming services, Sports Flick is still a tough sell. It’s great to see an array of 1080p content for a range of niche sports as well as automatic resume for replays, which can also be downloaded on the app. For almost everything else, though, Sports Flick is a pass.

As soon as Optus Sport went after Foxtel’s sporting dominance by targeting, at the time, where people watch cricket and international soccer broadcasting, it was clear the next content streaming war was going to be over sports. Since then, Foxtel Now has split off to include Kayo Sports, Optus Sport is back to one sport, and Stan Sport has snatched rugby union away from Foxtel.

And now a new contender emerges in Sports Flick, which may not top the list of best sport streaming services in Australia, but there’s certainly something there for niche tastes.

Eclectic is a diplomatic term for otherwise saying that Sports Flick’s content is a bit all over the place. Here’s the list of content we found during our tests:

• Australian Baseball League
• Austrian Bundesliga
• Body Building
• Boxing
• Chivas Guadalajara
• Future Wrestling Australia
• International Rugby League
• K-League
• Liga Primera
• MMA
• Ocean Explorer fishing
• Oxford City FC
• Sailing
• Select ICC matches
• UAE Pro League
• UEFA Women’s Champions League
• The Wednesday League
• XFC
• Yoga

At face value, that reads like a decent list of content, particularly when you compare it to the singular sports focus of services like Optus Sport, Stan Sport (for now it has just rugby union) and even Prime Video. But aside from being a hodgepodge of sporting options, some of those categories are also barebones. For example, Body Building only had one on-demand video at the time of writing, while the Boxing category had two. Other sections like Sailing only seem to have documentary content in them with no indication of upcoming additions (live or otherwise).

There were rumblings of a soccer coup wherein Sports Flick would snatch the UEFA Champions League rights from Optus Sport but, according to Guardian, that bid fell through.

On the surface, there are two straightforward payment options for Sports Flick. Spend $14.99 a month or pay $99 for a year of access. The catch is, unlike the normal trend of displaying full prices in Australia, those prices are less GST. So you’re looking at adjusted prices when you click ‘Subscribe’: $16.49 for a monthly subscription or $109.99 annually. That’s not as costly as Kayo Sports, but it’s not so cheap that you wouldn’t think twice about buying a subscription.

This would feel less like nitpicking if Sports Flick wasn’t also mixing in pay-per-view (PPV) to further confuse what comes with a Sports Flick subscription and what doesn’t. Admittedly, the PPV content is mostly relegated to the bottom of the content scroll, which is a positive first step. But then there’s content you can watch confusingly mixed in with replays that are supposed to be PPV.

For instance, the 2020–2021 Twenty20 Tri-Nation Series is listed as $7.99 to buy but, at the time of writing, you could watch the first three of the seven matches as part of your subscription. It’s a similar story for the recent Bangladesh vs West Indies series, where there’s a $4.35 price tag for the third ODI that you can start watching as part of your subscription.

I chanced upon the European Cricket Series videos on Sports Flick – which weren’t easily accessible from the home page – but when I tried to play some of them, I was prompted to buy, then told I was already a subscriber. Clicking on ‘Start watching’ took me back to the Sports Flick home page and it was a Groundhog Day loop.

At the time of writing, there was no free trial for Sports Flick, nor a money-back guarantee if you cancelled ahead of renewal. If you do want to save some money during out-of-season times, you are able to pause your subscription for one month, two months or three months via the ‘Manage subscription’ link.

Sports Flick is available on a decent number of devices, which you can see below:

• Apple TV (4th gen min.)
• Roku (3rd gen min.)
• Android TV (1st gen min.)
• Fire TV (1st gen min.)
• Chromecast
• iPhone 5 and up (iOS 10.0 min.)
• iPad 4, iPad Mini 2 and up (iOS 10.0 min.)
• Android devices (Android 4.3 min.)
• Microsoft Edge (version 15 min.)
• Safari (version 10 min.)
• Firefox (version 49 min.)
• Chrome (version 45 min.)

Sports Flick is clearly a work in progress as far as the user interface is concerned, but it’s a far cry from what sports fans have come to expect from the likes of Kayo Sports, Optus Sport and Stan Sport. The layout is often confusing, particularly when using a web browser, and finding the content you want isn’t as straightforward as it should be.

You can scroll down the list of available content and hit ‘Show more’ to eventually see available content, or you can get frustrated by inconsistent search results. Search entries are taken literally rather than generally. For example, if you search for ‘cricket’, you’ll only get results with ‘cricket’ in the title, instead of all available cricket matches. That’s the same across web and Android app, even if the app experience is better.

When you do find something you want to watch, playback is a mixed bag. It’s great to see a lot of content available in 1080p, but there was a mix of 720p content, too. That wouldn’t be so bad if there was some user-friendliness consideration in how content is presented. There only seems to be full-match replays for live events: no highlights, jump-to markers on full match replays, or minis. That’s not the end of the world, except there’s no match trimming here, which means you may have to skip through ground staff prepping a field, boring preamble or even an old-school no-signal screen to get to the action.

While the app lets you activate push notifications to let you know when new content drops, you’ll need to regularly check Sports Flick or use Google to find when live matches are happening. The top carousel seems to highlight previous matches more than upcoming live ones (unlike Kayo Sports and Stan Sport), and even if you do hit the ‘Remind me’ prompt, Sports Flick outsources that heads up to a calendar instead of using push notifications.

The main thing to like about the app is you can download match replays and, mercifully, you can easily cast content. With my Google Pixel 5 phone, though, the playback window didn’t fit the screen properly, pushing buttons to the edges of the screen and partially outside of where I could interact. Still, whether you’re watching via app or browser, the Sports Flick experience really isn’t up to snuff next to its competitors.

Sports Flick’s unique selling proposition is that it has access to sports and leagues that you won’t find on other services, which means that if you want to watch those niche sports or leagues in Australia, you have to go through Sports Flick. On one hand, it’s great to see more competitors emerge to take on the big names in sports streaming. On the other, it’s another sports service to pay for if you want it all.

It’d be great to see an underdog story where Sports Flick is the little streaming service that could, but while there are facets to admire, there’s a lot that’s not up to par. And when you start comparing Sports Flick to other sports streaming services, it really falls short.