I think we're still in a transitional stage for live sports streaming where there's a middleman (or more) between the content source (EPL, RWC etc) and the public. The ultimate end point is direct streaming from the source, as some US sports now do. The concept of a local broadcaster owning geographically restricted rights is outdated in the modern interconnected information environment.
totally this, for me the main issue that spark has is that they are relying on a company in the states to essentially package the content into stream-able data. If they were doing this at the source or even in NZ then a) there wouldn't be a 40-50second (2 minutes) delay b) less chance of this outside your control causing issues.
Aside from local content, Sky also rely on an overseas company to provide feeds, commentary etc for them.
provide feeds yes, but not to repackage the content into multiple viewable streams.
sparks current method is: content sent from Japan to spark, spark send it to company in America to repackage, data gets sent to 6 servers in NZ to be streamed.