ITV don't care about live sport other than football. They might bury some cycling away on ITV4 somewhere, but that's about it in terms of the sports coverage.
Neither Channel 4 nor Channel 5 give a fig about live sport, other than 4's Saturday horse racing.
If RL wants to be on free to air TV, then it's the BBC or nothing and they know it. Hence the BBC can coast along in its happy little bubble with Kear and Davies chirping out cliches like a pair of demented furbies. Much as I might take Davies to task for not knowing/understanding the current obstruction interpretation, when an international coach sat next to him gets the same incident wrong what does that say about his ability as a pundit?
Crabtree doing interviews is cringeworthy. He's so stilted and wooden in his delivery it's like he's struggling to remember what he's going to say. While I appreciate you're probably not going to get Tanya Arnold inside the dressing rooms at the end of the game, put someone like Wilkin in who can at least string a sentence together in there.