The Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games are less than a month away, and Seven Network’s digital team has a simple pitch for Australian sports fans: there is no excuse to miss a moment.
“Streaming is now sort of the entry point that most of our viewers know,” Kirsty Bradmore, Seven’s Head of Sport Digital, told Mediaweek. “Gone are the days when you go to linear, and then there’s this companion piece.”
7plus Sport will carry 15 simultaneous live streams and eight free ad-supported television (FAST) replay channels when the Games open on 23 July, with the platform rebuilt around what Bradmore describes as a “Your games, your way” philosophy – the idea that viewers can follow the coverage on their own terms, at their own hours.
“It means that whenever you have time to view the content you want, you’ll be able to do so in the best way possible,” Bradmore said.
“Whether that’s the curator channel on linear, the 24/7 Games channel, or whatever individual sport you want.”
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Birmingham lessons
The scale of the 7plus offering is, in part, a direct response to lessons from the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games, when Seven ran two broadcast channels concurrently – a split that complicated viewing rather than simplifying it.
“We had two channels running the entire time, constantly telling viewers to go here or there to catch up on what’s happening live,” Head of Commonwealth Games Anna Stone told Mediaweek.
“For Glasgow, we have one broadcast channel where every athlete will get their time in the sun. Now having 7plus there, where everything is always available, means that rather than trying to be clever across two channels, everything is on 7plus. If you love netball, you can sit there and watch every game of netball that day uninterrupted and for free.”
Seven held a 49–50% share of broadcast audiences during Birmingham, a 60% share of live streaming, and reached 2.1 million people on 7plus Sport. Total audience reach across Seven and 7plus Sport was 11.1 million.
Timezone, and the overnight question
Glasgow’s time difference, which puts most live competition in the early hours of the Australian morning, is not the liability it might appear to be, according to Stone and Bradmore.
“It’s actually a fairly good time zone,” Bradmore said. “People can get the misconception that because it’s overnight they won’t be there for it, but really, our prime time viewing is where you’ll see all your heats, and then you don’t have to get up too early in the morning to see everything live from 5 am onwards. But if you do choose to sleep at any point, you can go to 7plus to catch up.”
Stone was blunter about it. “When they’re global events like this, we just suck it up as Australians and get on with it. You embrace it for the 10 days. None of that’s a concern for us.”
What the data says
Seven’s expanded digital footprint has also sharpened its audience intelligence ahead of Glasgow. Stone said the data picture is now clearer than it has ever been.
“We had always suspected where our key events would be – swimming and athletics, as we know that’s where we win the most medals,” she said.
“But now, having this fully fleshed-out digital programme available to us and the data it brings, we have a really clear picture of what our audience wants, and it just makes it easier to deliver it to them.”
Among the eight FAST channels – which operate when no live Games content is running – is Glasgow Glory, a curated highlights stream Bradmore describes as the digital equivalent of the linear broadcast.
“We’re going to go through and find those highlights that we think our audience really wants to see – Aussies winning gold or magic moments from the Games,” she said.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be a medal ceremony, but just something that’s touched our audience.”
Platform and broadcast
New 7plus Sport features for Glasgow include push-notification reminders before live programming, picture-in-picture on mobile, live channel filtering and scrolling on connected TV, “Flares” to surface key moments in on-demand content, and an upcoming live top feature on the homepage.
A Commonwealth Games Hub is live now, housing athlete profiles, interviews from 7NEWS and Sunrise, and the docuseries The Pursuit of Unstoppable.
On linear, Seven will broadcast Glasgow 2026 in prime time from 7 pm each night, with coverage running through to 7:30 am across all 10 days. Southern Cross Austereo’s Triple M network will simulcast Seven’s live broadcast from 10 pm to 5 am, with Triple M and Hit Networks providing updates during breakfast.
Combined reach is projected to exceed 12 million Australians.
The Games run from 23 July to 2 August, featuring more than 3,000 athletes from 74 nations and territories, 133 sporting sessions, and 215 gold medals across 10 sports and six Para sports.
Stone’s measure of success is, fittingly, immediate.
“We’ll know pretty quickly if it’s going well or not because you get immediate feedback these days, so we’re in a position to adjust and adapt should we need to. We intend to deliver exactly what we say we will: 10 days of phenomenal sport and entertainment.
“We know that people will invest in these stories, and ride that wave for 10 days – and at the end we’ll all get to look at each other and say, how good was that?”