The punishing thing about this is what to do for sport mad elderly. My granddad loves his sport and is in his mid 80's. He struggles with Sky TV, let alone moving him to a smart tv with apps and logins for multiple services. It'll be an awkward period for this age group unfortunately.
This is the problem with the new technology......firstly the suppliers rarely get the offering right the first time (well done spark for taking F1 and not having the platform ready) secondly they end up costing the end user more to upgrade their kit to make it work. The biggest issue with streaming is that NZ's network simply aint up to the entire population watching an event any the same time. The country will go into shutdown mode when the interweb crashes when we are all trying to watch the RWC final.
I was listening to a network engineer on the radio the other day, and that's just not quite true. While yes, you could argue that certain areas don't have fast enough internet to the door. But the entire network doesn't fall apart because everyone is watching the same thing - the Spark server doesn't send out 4,000,000 different data streams. It sends out 1, which is split as it propagates across a network.
There are still big scaling problems, but the capacity of the network as a whole is not one.