How can TV networks combat streaming video?
Exclusive: Australian programmers explain their different strategies to hold broadcast TV against a wave of streaming TV.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under News, Streaming, Top Stories
EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is coming, Presto, Stan and Fetch TV are here. For traditional broadcast networks the view is rapidly changing.
So how can our networks combat a wave of content to ensure they remain viable destinations for viewers?
Nine is a joint partner with Fairfax in Stan, Seven is a partner with Foxtel in Presto TV, ABC is planning revenue streams through iview and SBS already owns two subscription TV channels.
TV Tonight asked Australian programmers how broadcast TV can still compete against SVODs in terms of what they commission and how they programme?
The answers were as diverse as their brands…
“Will a broad mass amount of Australians be motivated to pay for this content?”
PETER ANDREWS (SBS):
“That’s a really good question. The first thing, I think, is will a broad mass amount of Australians be motivated to pay for this content when you think about how competitive and how strong free-to-air channel business is in Australia?
“When you look at what the free-to-air channels are offering, and how they’re getting deeper and deeper into Australian content, and providing the audience with a reason to stay on free-to-air, it’s a really interesting time.
“I think we’re very much focussed on understanding that audiences are changing the way they view content. So for us, it’s not necessarily about the Overnight ratings anyway. It’s about how we can get our content to the broadest, biggest possible audience, however they want to watch it.
“So, whether it’s on free-to-air or whether it’s on our On Demand or whether it’s on Catch Up, it’s really important that we’re not just focussed and blinkered by the Overnight numbers. We understand that viewers will watch content in different ways, so we’re just about really focussing on making good shows and good quality content.
“This is also about the things that we can control, which is the Australian-commissioned shows.”
“Know your audience and be distinctive.”
BRENDAN DAHILL (ABC):
“I think the first answer is (having) intimate knowledge of your audience. You need to be aware of what they like and what they don’t like. It’s the thing that separates good commissioners from bad commissioners: knowing your audience.
“I think we spend a lot of time worrying away at our audience and what makes us distinctive in the market − so, knowing your audience and being distinctive.
“And then, I think, also, in a linear TV world, there’s a danger of being too reactive and I’d like to think that we are a relatively consistent choice − we stick by our choices, on the whole. So, there’s a predictability and a navigability about what we do. Obviously that is in part driven by us knowing our audience hate us messing about. And also, we don’t have the marketing budgets that the commercial networks do so we have to stick by our choices a bit more as well.
“So, there’s audience insight, there’s distinctiveness − what could only feel like an ABC show − then there’s being consistent. They would be my three answers to that question.”
“Curated content people want to watch.”
BEVERLEY McGARVEY (TEN):
“It’s a complex answer. The first answer everybody will probably give is that you’ve got to offer content people want to watch and then curate it in a way that makes sense. In terms of scheduling, you’ve got make it easy and accessible and the other thing is to make something people want to watch in an immediate fashion. So I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here! is Live, Gogglebox is a 7 day turnaround, Shark Tank is a really compelling show that people will be talking about the next day. You want to be part of it.
“So it’s really about the quality of the content and the curation of the content and also offering things that are unique to broadcast television with Live, mass-appeal shows.
“NCIS has been on Tuesday nights forever, everybody knows that. Family Feud is every night and habit-forming. I think habit-forming content becomes part of the routine.
“In winter you can watch MasterChef and it’s familiar. People still like that escapist, easy option when they come home so they can watch shows that are curated and scheduled for them.”
“Event TV will continue to rate.”
ANDREW BACKWELL (Nine):
“I think the way you counteract this is by concentrating on Event Television. So, News you have to watch Live when it’s happening. Current affairs, likewise.
“I think what we’re going to see going forward is Event TV will continue to rate really well. Whether, it’s the tennis, the cricket, the rugby league, AFL. Anything that’s big event TV will continue to rate.
“What really gets squashed when there’s so much choice up there are the second-tier shows. So you see at 9:30 or 10:30 where we don’t program our strongest content, that’s when you start to see a scatter. People go sampling on the multi channels.
“Sport is also vital. You have to have Sport in your schedule as TEN well know, because it gives you a good base. You need to have a very strong News and Current Affairs brand because, once again, it just gives you a platform. Nine News delivers over a million every single night in our schedule. So does A Current Affair. But you’ll see that, for us, we don’t want to spend all our money on small little shows, we’d rather put it into big Event TV shows (such as) The Voice. I think that’s what it’s all about. Just big Events.”
“Australian productions and Sport”
BRIAN WALSH (Foxtel):
“Foxtel is a very successful business and we want to make sure we maintain our relevance and success in the market. The way we see forward in doing that is to maintain and increase our commitment to Australian productions. That’s what we’re doing notably in Drama and across Lifestyle and in particular, Sport.
“Streaming services will just not offer Live uninterrupted Sport. I think Foxtel has already demonstrated it’s got strength in Live Sport with every game of the AFL, rugby league, V8 Supercars, cricket….. if you love Australian Sport you have to have Foxtel.
“So Australian productions you can’t see anywhere else, Live News and Sport.”
This was the final feature in TV Tonight’s Programmer’s Wrap for 2015.
(NB: Seven did not respond with a Programmer’s Wrap interview this year, when these interviews were conducted)
35 Responses
First issue we have is the internet. The current government has implemented a policy that will cripple the countries internet for decades to come. We simply won’t be able to get the same services streaming can offer overseas. Netflix who is clearly the leading brand is moving to 4K content which requires a connection of 25-30Mbps. Our NBN is now only targeting 25Mbps. So right there we’re already not going to be able to have what else where is getting. Who knows what more bandwidth consumer formats and options will come in coming years and decades. So for access to equivalent products, downloading will be the only way.
10 dollar price point is fine and people will pay. Friends of mine in the USA find it strange we pirate here because they have netflix and hulu. They simple say pirating isn’t common because there is no need.
Another hurdle is they need better uniformity in…
Can FTA compete? No….
Reasons ….
* Streaming offers variety of drama, comedy on call, with either very few if any ads at all ….
*FTA offers reality television, more reality television, and endless reality television ……
Need I say more?
Well with on demand you can sit down to watch a programme and actually watch it. WIth Australian networks you can sit down to watch a programme, find you have to sit through an extra 20 minutes of whatever show preceeded it and then discover it’s been pulled from the schedule anyway.
The only way I see it, is quality and quantity content is needed. Look at netflix, lots of stuff which are good. Also sports. I mean, $10 a month would do very very well.
High Quality + Decent Pricing + Good and Plentiful content = Customers
Sports in HD live would bring in an insane amount of people.
There are two competing but contradictory forces at work in the Australian TV business. Firstly, for two decades the majority (circa 70%) of households have made it very clear that they prefer free TV to paying for it. Secondly, a whole new generation of viewers, mostly under 30, have also made it clear they will pay (or pirate) stuff if it is not available when they want it. Free TV will be around for a long time. But the fragmentation will increase. No-one predicted the (positive) effect digital multichannelling would have on the networks. Who knows what effect SVOD will have.
“Nine News delivers over a million every single night in our schedule. So does A Current Affair.” – LOL Except Last night
David, I particularly like how tex and eastwest have summarised this.
Basically, from the “programmers” responses above, and from their responses you reported on earlier (all from the same interview) we can conclude two things:
1. Clearly they have absolutely no idea what the average Australian viewer expects or wants.
2. They are prepared to lie through their teeth in order to justify this lack of knowledge and understanding.
If they were employed under the same conditions as the rest of us they’d be fired or at the very least have a drastic pay cut. However it seems that their employment conditions are basically the same as our politicians!
And they are about as useful and effective 😉
Major sporting competitions will do well because people of all ages watch them live. But nothing is certain, Australia’s pool games in the Asian did not do well for the ABC on delay.
MKR does well because they cast characters and force them to compete and eat dinner with each other. People watch it live so they can keep up and talk about it. But that audience will no longer stick around for whatever is on afterwards.
The old approach of buying up lots of cheap US shows (or BBC shows for the ABC) will no longer work. The US market has fragmented and they no longer make stuff targeted at the white middle class that everybody watches. Shows that do well there with 50 population who lap up murder mysteries. But they won’t bring in the money needed to run a commercial network.
Other than that nobody really knows.
As long as the FTA’s keep paying for original, local content, then there should be no concerns. It’s when the streaming services start offering production companies more money for their product, then it’ll get interesting. Producers are content makers. Where it’s aired, is irrelevant to them.
Which, if the historical examples of what happened with Pay TV & the current examples of what’s happening with streaming in the US & Europe are anything to go by, is the next step.
Outwardly at least the FTA networks – at least the commercials – seem to prefer the “King Cnut” path of trying to hold back the turning tide. Competition, outside of their cosy little local oligopoly, is something to be prevented at all costs – or at the very least done on their terms, not the market’s…
Here’s some free advice to the networks;-
1. Less ad breaks and especially those damn pop ups that appear during the shows.
2. Stick to the timetable. Sick of shows – especially ones film 3 months ago – running over by 15, 30 even longer.
3. Fast track shows thanks. HTGAWM is halfway through the first season in the US. Empire has just screened its 6the episode and Ten is planning to dump it late on Sunday nights.
4. Don’t dump shows midway through the season. Just noticed The Good Wife has been dumped tonight. Thank goodness one can view it online rather than put up with network’s contempt for viewers.
No charge for this advice – you are most welcome.
Channel ten are up to date with the good wife in the US. They have no new eps to show. There aren’t any new eps till march. Ten need to do a better job at communicating things like this to their viewers.
All channels need to communicate better. However in this day and age of the interwebbythingy most people really should know that the US is pretty useless at keeping shows going for more than 4-5 weeks at a time and take breaks for a wide variety of reasons.
TV habits have changed and people want to watch shows when they want to see them, and not be dictated to by a network as to when a show is on. It’s one of the reason piracy has taken off, plus the fact we don’t want to wait month for a show to air, only to have low ratings see it dumped weeks later.
Streaming services offer the flexibility we now want as viewers to see what we want when we want and on the device we want.
It just goes back to the same old things…start on time, stick to a schedule, have shows available online right after they air, etc. I think they are all in for a rude awakening. On another note, Nine News and ACA don’t rate over a million every night.
It doesn’t really matter. The pendulum is swinging. Free to Air TV will have the transmitters turned off on day not too far away. The spectrum is needed for the communications industry. It will all be streamed. TV will have a bright future, except for regioanl TV.
@eastwest101, @Tex, and @tvf have said most of what I wanted to so let me add some corrections instead.
ABC: “I think the first answer is (having) intimate knowledge of your audience.” – except when you try to attract incredulous 25 year-olds by commissioning poorly-written, cast, and directed crap such as Crownies and Hiding.
Ten: “NCIS has been on Tuesday nights forever,..” – Er, not true. It, and especially the spin-offs, have been all over the shop.
“Family Feud is every night…”. Every weeknight but it is on every channel.
Nine: “Nine News delivers over a million every single night in our schedule.” Not true at all.
“So does A Current Affair.” hahahahahahahahahaha
Seven: While we’re pulling 1.6m a night without trying, we’ll let our arrogance speak for itself.
SBS has kept it a very dark secret that when the Australian content obligations of PayTV were established all the predominantly drama channels on PayTV had to spend 10% of their drama acquisition budget on Australian drama. SBS convinced a gullible regulator that World Movies was not a drama channel but a narrow caster on the basis most of its drama content was in a foreign language and therefore didn’t have to contribute. World Movies was the first channel to become profitable and has been ever since. It has contributed nothing to local drama. So now you have a situation where SBS as a free to air has almost no money to invest in local drama while its wholly owned commercial PayTV subsidiary World Movies which is also now on Stan has no legal obligation to invest in local drama. David I suggest you ask SBS’ management if they still consider World Movies to be a narrow caster and why…
So to summarize the responses:
ABC and SBS” “Yes we are aware of it, have our own audiences and have made mature serious attempts at streaming our content”
Ten: “We will mouth/spin all sorts of platitudes about respecting our audience while erecting random rubbish reality roadblocks, in truth we really have no idea what we are aiming for or what we are doing on a day-to-day basis. #businessasusualin headlesschooks
Nine: “We are going to double down on shiny floor/renovation reality because we haven’t had any new ideas in about 10 years.”
Seven: “You are not the government so we can’t be bothered to talk to you, we only talk to people when we have rent seeking to do.
Funny, I was going to say much the same thing…
ABC & SBS : “It’s an interesting question, which we address by trying to understand and focus on what our viewers want, while at the same time strengthening the identity which makes us uniquely identifiable.”
10 & 9 : “It’s an interesting question, but first let me mention our headline & event shows. We have many of these, which I will now name. You’ll see there are many names, and they are ours – not theirs. Did I mention the names of our shows? Sometimes we show sports, and that’s important – so let me mention our news/entertainment/reality shows…”
Foxtel : “We’re very successful, and we show drama, lifestyle, and sport. Mostly sports. Let me name some of the sports we have. As you can see, we have lots of sports. Anybody who watches sports has us, so if you want to see sports, get Foxtel. Please. Everyone…
Brilliantly said!
Sport (cricket and rugby league) is the one thing that got me watching live TV, now I can add Im A Celebrity and Shark Tank. Everything else is recorded or streamed.
I used to watch The Block, The Voice, Big Brother, Masterchef, Biggest Loser: but year by year got sick of them.
I think I’m A Celebrity works for me because it’s easy to watch, funny and is unusual enough. Plus I like to vote.
The guys from the ABC and SBS make good sense. Surprisingly, so does the lady from Ten with this comment:
““NCIS has been on Tuesday nights forever, everybody knows that. Family Feud is every night and habit-forming. I think habit-forming content becomes part of the routine”
This is absolutely true. Humans are incredible creatures of habit. You only have to look at teenagers who have been deprived of FB while they are at school and see them scrambling desperately for their phones at 3:30 to understand this. If you can cultivate habits in your audience then you will keep them.
However 7, 9 and 10 are all guilty doing exactly the opposite. The problem is that habits take time to form (although not always a lot of time) and the networks are simply not prepared to do this. So in the end, they will lose.
How can the viewing public form habits when you have to constantly check the epg to determine whether
1. The show they want to watch is still airing?
2. Whether the show they want to watch has changed timeslots?
3. Whether the show they want to watch is a double episode?
4. Whether the show they want to watch is a repeat rather than new episode?
5. Whether the show they want to watch will start at the advertised time 8.30 pm or instead it airs at 8.43pm for example?
Spot on! When Network programmers treat viewers and shows with such contempt and disposability there is no way thet any new “habits” can be formed … other than, as I always do, record everything I want to watch (with an extra 15 minutes before and after) and watch it the next night while recording more. Then there is their other stupid behaviour of shafting a new show after just 1 episode even though they want us to form habits. What??? So either way, we will watch what we want when we want and not when they want, making the ratings complete rubbish!
Everything said above is completely correct. Half the reason I believe for the falling ratings is because it’s almost impossible to form habits watching shows because of how often their timeslots and days are changed. I remember not so long ago when you were guaranteed a show would stay in the same timeslot for years.
Desperate Housewives – Monday 8:30.
Packed to the rafters – Tuesday 8:30
Friends – Monday 7:30
I never have a clue when nine is showing a new episode of the Big Bang theory nowadays. Fortunately they repeat each episode 75 times so I usually catch up.
Preach it, sister!
Amen to that.
I like the catch up service but apart from that, I for one am not interested in any streaming service.
I find that it eats into my monthly broadband limit and really, it is not my cup of tea. I have been waiting for the NBN now for nearly 12 months, the box has been on the wall outside for 18 months, the box inside for around10 months, but after appointment after appointment it still is not connected.
I can’t see how streaming video can possibly compete with broadcast TV unless you have the NBN if my experience is any guide. The fastest Net I can get is ADSL2+ and wherever I try to watch videos they are constantly buffering, freezing, stopping and starting. The only way I can watch them is to start a recorder such as Wondershare or Replay Media Catcher, play the video, turn the screen off and go away for about two hours then watch the recording later.
A good streaming service will adjust the quality of the content to match your line. However there will always be issues that is true, just as there will always be issues with terrestrial broadcast. The browser you use will also affect your streaming experience I have found.
In addition I found (oddly) that my Chromecast works wonderfully with some streaming services (7, ABC, SBS) but with others (notably 9) there are times when I have to give up and just watch it on the computer 🙁
“The fastest Net I can get is ADSL2+ and wherever I try to watch videos they are constantly buffering, freezing, stopping and starting.”
I have ADSL2+ and don’t have any of those problems. I think TENPlay is sometimes a bit dodgy, but SBS and iView are a joy.
Totally agree. I live out in rural NSW, and due to oddities of where I live, I have to get VAST satellite for TV – which is interesting in that I then get all the NT and FNQ but no real NSW ads. This also means I have Satellite internet, I defy anyone to attempt to stream decently on NBN Satellite. So I have to either record when I am out, or watch at that time, as I would have to pay for an upgraded box to be able to record one channel and watch another. Any way you look at it its very frustrating. Coupled with no video store in town I am stuck borrowing DVDs from friends who have what I want to watch, or just doing without. I cant justify Foxtel at the moment.
I hope this means networks will look to invest more in local production. Although maybe reality, hopefully drama. I also see that networks are starting to grab more sports. First run local content will keep the viewers interested.
Creating strong brands and familiar destinations. I don’t want to always have to think about what I am going to watch. Most of the time I want someone to do it for me.