Tennis has rolled into a new year and already we are into the first Grand Slam, with the Australian Open under way and as fascinating as ever. As a UK viewer, the last couple of weeks have been pretty disappointing, as Amazon dropped their coverage of the sport via their Prime streaming service and Sky have picked it up instead.

We got a taste of this during the US Open last year and it was… diabolical. At the time I tried to be generous, hoping things would improve when they had the full time WTA rights, but so far it doesn’t look like anything’s about to change on the replay front and that’s the most important thing from my point of view.

Anyway, that side of things doesn’t matter for the Australian Open, as that is streamed on Discovery+ in the UK, and has, thankfully, as many replays as you could wish for. They’ve also added a new feature this year which has chapter highlights on a stream for the important moments. For example, you can skip to a set point or a crucial missed break point, and of course the final moments of a successful match point.

The controls are a bit better too and it seems like you can go back to a match you were previously watching and pick up where you left off, rather than having to scroll around desperately trying to remember what the score was when you had to go and make that cup of tea. It’s much better and really enjoyable to watch.

The replays of all matches are crucial when something is not in your given timezone and that’s a lesson I hope Sky/Now TV are open to learning because after these two glorious weeks, we’ll go back to the despair of no tennis until the next grand slam… unless something significant changes in the streaming options. Oh well. At least we still have Break Point to watch, even if it is watching tennis from a year ago.