Insiders say that despite $25 million being spent on NZR+, it was beset by
poor planning, strategic uncertainty, a bad choice of name and a failure to get the full buy-in of the All Blacks.

Gregor Paul looks at what went wrong.

The day before the All Blacks left for their end-of-season tour to Japan and the UK in late 2022, there was a roundtable, crisis summit meeting at Auckland Airport’s Novotel.

Senior figures within the All Blacks and Rugby Players’ Association (RPA) had called it. They wanted clarity on the specifics behind New Zealand Rugby’s (NZR) plans to film a documentary series – that would become known as In Their Own Words – during the tour.

NZR wanted to make a long-form, behind-the-scenes documentary series that would take the viewer into the inner sanctum of the All Blacks and be shown on its new content hub NZR+.

But the All Blacks had been left in the dark about who would be involved and what story it was intending to tell. Also, no rules of engagement had been agreed about where cameras could go.

The list of attendees in Auckland included Richie McCaw (in his capacity as an NZRC board member), NZR CEO Mark Robinson and most of his executive team, All Blacks coach Ian Foster, head of the RPA Rob Nichol, and All Blacks players Sam Cane, Dane Coles and Brodie Retallick.

It is understood that $10.5m had been allocated to NZR+ – money to build the platform and create content to launch in June 2023 ahead of the World Cup – so cameras being inside the team was something the All Blacks were going to have to get used to.

The players, coaches and RPA were on board with the plan to make a documentary but wouldn’t agree to an external camera crew they didn’t know being embedded with the team.

One source says there was a wariness within the All Blacks as many of the players, management and coaching staff had been around in 2017, when NZR had commissioned a behind-the-scenes documentary with Amazon.

“We felt we were burned pretty badly by the Amazon series,” the source said.

The coaching staff felt the presence of the cameras had been a hindrance to performance and that the series had diminished the mystique of the All Blacks.

NZR, after hearing that the team didn’t want the distraction of working with an external camera crew, amended the plan.

Agreement was reached that the footage would be captured by the All Blacks’ existing videography unit that had been with the team all year.

Filming parameters – where cameras could and couldn’t film – were agreed on a traffic light basis. Red areas were permanently off-limits, amber areas had to be checked with management on a weekly basis and green zones were always okay to film.

An external production house would, however, be commissioned to edit the captured footage and conduct additional interviews with players and coaching staff in January 2023 to fashion a storyline into a publishable package.

The contract was awarded to UK-based, Sony-backed broadcast agency Whisper, which had set up a New Zealand office in 2022 looking for big ticket production opportunities – be that making a documentary series or delivering live, match content.

There was not a tender process as such to appoint Whisper, but NZR says it was chosen because it was competitively priced against market benchmarks and had relevant experience.

Whisper was told it would only be able to direct the project remotely – instructing All Blacks media staff and camera operators in the UK via Zoom calls.

It was an unusual and challenging way for Whisper to make what NZR was hoping would be a high-impact docuseries, and perhaps unsurprisingly, two sources have told the Herald that the first cuts were “hugely disappointing”.

When the edited version still failed to impress, the late TVNZ veteran producer Andrew Shaw was brought in to salvage the situation.

Whisper had hired a studio in Ponsonby at a cost of between $30,000-$40,000 to shoot player interviews and is believed to have been paid around $500,000 in total for its role in putting the four-part series together.

But one source says that after watching these early versions of In Their Own Words, Shaw said: “I’m just not seeing on screen where all the f***ing money has gone.”

The project was eventually edited to NZR’s satisfaction and supplemented with additional interviews shot by NZR’s in-house team and published in July 2023 to generally positive reviews.

But one source says: “We should never have used Whisper and it was never clear why we did.”

Deeper tension

In many ways, the last-minute, poorly planned way In Their Own Words was executed, typified how NZR+ was managed ahead of its launch.

In Their Own Words was a project that needed buy-in from the All Blacks coaching team and players, and clear expectations.

And yet, the day before the All Blacks flew to Japan, none of this had been sorted and the Herald understands this was primarily because relations between the two entities had deteriorated since late 2020.

NZR had firstly failed to meet its legal obligations to consult with the players about its plans to sell a 7.5% equity stake in the game’s commercial assets to US fund manager Silver Lake for $262m.

Tensions between the All Blacks and NZR had erupted on another front in July 2022 over the way Foster was treated by his employer after the series loss to Ireland.

Robinson publicly denounced the team’s performance as “unacceptable”, and the players felt the head coach was not well supported by his employer.

But there was a deeper tension more generally, with several sources having said that NZR’s executive and board felt that the All Blacks had operated in isolation for too long – effectively not answerable to the national body and able to pushback on commercial projects as it suited them.

NZR may not have been consciously running a strategy to rein in the All Blacks, but certainly the non-consultation over the Silver Lake deal and the public castigation of Foster in July made many inside the team feel like there was a constant power struggle.

The All Blacks manager role was also removed from NZR’s executive team in 2022 – potentially another sign that NZR was taking control of the All Blacks.

“I’m not sure if I ever felt a bigger disconnect from the organisation and the All Blacks in my time in the jersey,” Beauden Barrett said of that period in Leading Under Pressure.

Given the importance of NZR+ to the overall commercial strategy, several people the Herald has spoken to say they were surprised that so little was done by NZR to rebuild a strong, aligned partnership with the All Blacks.

What’s in a name?

When the deal to sell an equity stake to Silver Lake for $262m was agreed in February 2022, $38m of that money was allocated for new commercial initiatives.

The deal also saw the creation of New Zealand Rugby Commercial – an entity to run the game’s revenue generating assets – which was initially led by Richard Thomas.

The most significant of these new initiatives was the creation of a content hub and Silver Lake had two distinct goals for NZR+.

Firstly, it was a data-capture exercise – a vehicle to learn details about consumers by making users register to watch content.

NZR’s knowledge about the All Blacks fanbase was poor, to the extent that it is understood that when it was looking for front-of-jersey sponsors in 2021, a significant number of potential buyers pulled out when the national body couldn’t provide even basic details about who supporters were and where they lived.

The second goal was to have a direct-to-consumer element such as making people pay to watch the broadcast of live games.

One well-placed source says there was never any finalised plan or timeline about direct monetisation, and that a range of options were under consideration – from using NZR+ as a subscription broadcast channel for all live games and no longer selling media rights to a third party such as Sky, to carving out specific competitions such as the NPC and FPC.

Insiders say the strategy broadly made sense, but that they were never sure an in-house streaming platform was the right distribution method, and that they felt there were significant failings in the execution. Those failings most notably included a bad choice of name and poor planning about how content would be marketed to drive engagement, registration and potential monetisation.

Most NZR staff had been expecting the hub to carry the All Blacks name in some form given its global recognition, but that was ruled out, according to one source: “For political reasons, because it needed to find a brand name inclusive of both male and female teams.”

Names such as “Front-row” and “Scrum” were considered, but no one spoken to by the Herald has been able to say why NZR+ was chosen, but universally they say they felt it was a mistake to not brand it something as simple as “All Blacks TV”.

One observer says the planning focus was placed too heavily on content production, “but not enough consideration was given to how they were going to get people to watch it, or to sign up”.

And then there was the sense that NZR never knew quite what sort of content it was looking to commission. In December 2023, NZR+ put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) to production houses.

The document brief said: “We do not need another ‘rugby doco’ or anything exactly like Drive to Survive [the Netflix series that goes behind the scenes of Formula One]. We need something that transcends the sport and takes us into the mainstream, as an aspirational brand that stands for things anyone can lock onto.”

The document stated that the target market was international followers and there were stats about key overseas markets with estimates of potential All Blacks fans within them (UK 25 million, USA 21 million, France and Japan both 18 million and Australia 8 million), and confirmation the total budget was $2m.

The Herald spoke to one prominent production house in December 2023 who said: “It felt like they really had no idea what they wanted, and that while they said they didn’t want another Drive to Survive, they absolutely did want a version of Drive to Survive.”

It’s unclear if anything was commissioned on the back of that RFP, but insiders and other stakeholders welcomed the fact there was at last a tender process.

Talent quest

In early 2023, NZR+ was the focal point of NZRC’s early meetings and discussions are believed to have focused on ways to “really move the needle” in the launch period.

Three names were put at the top of a wish list to serve as the focus of a major rugby-adjacent content series: former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, music sensation Lorde and Hollywood film director Taika Waititi.

Ardern was ruled out because it was election year and Lorde was on the road with her Solar Power World tour.

Waititi was a possibility as NZR and NZRC board member Bailey Mackey had a pre-existing relationship with him, but the issue would be finding time in his schedule.

By March, Waititi had provisionally agreed, having found a free window, but it is understood that it was on the proviso that the project would be produced by Mackey and his company Pango Productions.

Mackey had appropriately declared his conflicts with both NZR and NZRC on taking the respective board seats, and the Herald has been assured that he withdrew from all discussions after bringing the proposal to the table.

The project – it was called Tour de Rugby and would involve Waititi travelling around France by helicopter meeting various former All Blacks such as Jerome Kaino – was signed off, with the Herald having been told that the total budget was close to $1m.

Waititi’s fee is believed to have been six figures but a relatively small percentage of the overall cost. Given he was appearing in front of the camera and working behind it – this was a considerable discount on his true market rates.

Through the eyes of the NZRC board, securing a Hollywood mega-star at a vastly reduced price was the project they had been looking for to give NZR+ an explosive start.

But while the conflict of interest may have been handled exactly as it should have been, the optics didn’t sit well with all stakeholders.

The Herald has spoken to one provincial representative who felt there was inadequate communication about the project and that the wider community, had they known, would have had concerns about an incumbent director’s company being awarded a near $1m contract without a tender process.

NZRC chair Ian Narev says: “From its inception NZRC has governed conflicts of interest using policies and processes that are consistent with those adopted by major companies, with which many NZRC board members of the time had considerable personal experience.

“All actual or perceived conflicts have been declared, considered and managed. In this case the conflict was raised early and considered by both NZR and NZRC boards, given that Bailey Mackey was a member of both boards.

“He was scrupulous in proactively pointing out actual or perceived conflicts – including the optics – at the earliest stage and was never present at any board discussion in which they were considered.

“NZRC was delighted that a Kiwi with the talent and following of Taika Waititi was willing to be involved.

“This was an entrepreneurial idea using unique, world-famous Kiwi talent. Accordingly, there was no tender process, because there was no comparable opportunity being considered.”

Mackey has told the Herald that while he was acutely conscious of the optics, of equal concern was the short turnaround for the project as it was shot in June and then edited and produced for release in August.

Industry veteran Ric Salizzo was also commissioned to produce a show that ran each day of the tournament at an estimated total cost of $2.3m.

These two projects didn’t move the needle anywhere near close to expectation. NZR had been hoping to win one million registrations by the end of the World Cup, but in the last week of the tournament it had gathered just 60,000.

Fan engagement

In June 2023, Thomas resigned as chief executive of NZRC and in January he was replaced by Craig Fenton, a former Simpson Grierson lawyer who had been working for Google in the UK.

In one of the only interviews he gave before he left the role 10 months later, he revealed to the Herald a major strategic shift in content strategy.

“NZR+ is fundamentally about fan engagement, both at home and abroad,” he said. “And in that sense it is a content play. Yes, we have a player that we have built, but this is about pushing content out over multiple platforms for broadcast all the way through to TikTok, YouTube and reels on Meta. And why is that?

“Because we need to meet the fan where they are and not have the hubris to expect them to watch only where we would like them to watch.

“I would expect for the foreseeable future that most of that consumption will occur on YouTube and on a shorter slice form on TikTok.”

And so it transpired that content didn’t just air on Youtube, it also started to feature people who had built their fame exclusively on the channel, such as US sensation Dude Perfect who filmed a bungy jump with Richie McCaw in Queenstown.

As a means to generate audience reach, the shift to being what Fenton called “being channel agnostic” worked.

More than 19 million watched an All Blacks series called Together We Walk. And of the 11 different series focused on the All Blacks, all of them have topped one million views, and five have been watched by more than five million people.

However, the bigger picture remained much the same – millions of dollars was being spent on content that was not delivering in line with the initial expectations around effective, customer data gathering through registrations at NZR+.

NZR revealed in April 2025 that despite having an estimated $18m poured into it over the past two years – NZR+ had only gathered 280,000 registrations, while the All Blacks’ Youtube channel had around 1.1m followers.

The strategic shift made sense on one level – to grow the overall audience – but it left questions hanging about the future of NZR+ and whether a dedicated, standalone platform was still needed.

One source said: “The decision to put everything on Youtube killed NZR+. As soon as he did that, why would anyone sign up for NZR+?”

Others have said that NZR+ played a small but important role in keeping the pressure on Sky in last year’s broadcast rights negotiation, and that the All Blacks needed to emulate other major sporting brands and have their own in-house channel through which they connect with fans.

Fenton was never replaced after his departure in late 2024, and the appointment of a new NZR board in early 2025 led by chairman David Kirk saw NZRC’s board downgraded to more of a committee – of which he was also chair.

Kirk put the focus on cost control and improving return on investment. Big, set-piece productions haven’t disappeared, but they need to be cost neutral or externally funded through bodies such as NZ on Air to be signed off.

In a further shift, NZR is talking to Netflix about a behind-the-scenes All Blacks docu-series to run next year.

The footage for this will come from the All Blacks in-house team of videographers and potentially edited into a series by an external agency, paid for by Netflix – but the global streamer won’t actually be being a licensing or access fee.

But the other major decision Kirk has made is that three years since it launched, NZR+ is being folded into the pre-existing All Blacks.com after anything between $25m and $38m could be said to have been spent on it.

The Herald has been told that about $5m was specifically allocated to the setting up, maintenance and running costs of NZR+, a further $20m on content production, and an unknown sum – but several millions – on marketing, promotion and management of NZR+.

The last of the $38m set aside to fund new initiatives will be spent by the end of this year, and other than NZR+, it’s not apparent what – if any – new ventures have been launched.

In an interview last month with TVNZ, Kirk was asked about NZR+ and he said: “It has tracked okay in terms of the number of people who engaged with us. But in terms of the really valuable, signed-up fans – people who have signed up, basically – that has not hit a level that has been material for our economics and the return on that has been low.

“That is something that has certainly underperformed compared with our hopes and expectations at the beginning.”

Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.