anyone hear crowd figures..

8500 in mel and 12,700 perth...

8032 in Sydney

Anyone know Brisbane's and Illawarra's?

The Hawkes look like being a great team to watch this season. There stadium is fairly small so they really should be selling out their venue evey week.

Sydney and Melbourne looked over hyped. They'll need to play a more attractive style of game and live up to the hype to make fans come back and bring their friends.

"They'll need to play a more attractive style of game and live up to the hype to make fans come back and bring their friends."

I think Perth have shown that the game style is not what gets large numbers to games. Their home games regularly feature dominant defences, low scoring, poor shooting and slow on-court play. However, they seem to provide a lot of non-basketball entertainment, they market extremely well outside of games and they get the crowd strongly involved during the games. Most importantly, they win a lot more often than they lose.

It seems to me that the quality of basketball just has to be okay, not top drawer, to get big crowds. The exciting, attractive basketball is more important for getting TV audiences to tune in and stay tuned in.

Would love to here streaming numbers from China and India?

Hawks 3247 (almost capacity, they have an area curtained though).
Brisbane 7000
NZ 6500

If united don't fire their crowds will drop off sharply.

There is no loyalty to the United brand. Most of the hardcore tigers folks are long gone.

Good to see that attendance for Brisbane.

Aussie, those figures are around the average for last season I think. I am not sure that the Fox Sports viewership matters anymore though. NBL.TV, SBS, and the Chinese numbers probably have a bigger weighing on the financial health of the league.

Regarding crowds in Brisbane, 90% or more of the games in the Convention Centre will sold out, with the game on Sunday plus next weeks getting very close to being gone. Hopefully this can help push up viewing number on Fox. But like ME said above, Fox Sports viewing number may have become somewhat irrelevant at this stage of the NBL's development.

Also, many people are dropping Foxtel and going for online subscriptions like Stan and Netflix. This means that 35 and 20K this year is much better than the same numbers in the preceding years.

Foxtel is dying and the NBL is very smart to already transition to online. They just need to improve and perfect the streaming service now.

Believe it or not, the "Foxtel dying" is a myth.

It's been reported a few times in the media lately, that subscriptions are actually increasing well.

Hawks not doing a good job at hiding it #601418

First sentence of the match report on hawks.com.au - 3,247

Looked, felt and sounded bigger than that. Didn't seem to be many empty seats on either side. There's more corporate boxes this year which has removed about 7 rows of seating at the curtain end.

Believe it or not, the "Foxtel dying" is a myth.

It's been reported a few times in the media lately, that subscriptions are actually increasing well.

I would say probably 80% of the people I know that had foxtel 12 months ago, do not have foxtel now myself included.

You should hear how Foxtel call center workers are when given any suggestion that I might shrink my package or end the service!

I can't really see Foxtel being a 'thing' in 10-15 years. But my problem with streaming sites is you never seem to get that true HD quality picture.