ACCC set to rule of Foxtel and Ten deal
The ACCC is set to hold a meeting tomorrow to decide on Foxtel’s proposed $77 million stake purchase in Ten Network, with a decision due Thursday, The Australian is reporting. “There will be a discussion this week where we’re scheduled to make a decision,” the ACCC chairman, Rod Sims, told The Australian. “Subject to how the decision making goes, this might be an approval or the release of a statement of issues.”
Seven overpaid for Big Bang claims Nine
Also in the Australian, the Nine Network's director of programming Andrew Blackwell told the paper that Seven was “desperate” to gain access to repeats of popular Warner Brothers sitcom The Big Bang Theory because the age profile of its audience is “getting significantly older”. Seven is rumoured to have paid up to 100,000 an episode for the back catalogue of the show with Blackwell saying: ““Seven have overpaid but they need The Big Bang Theory on their schedule because they’ve got a demographic problem.”
MCN reaps rewards of programmatic platform
Foxtel's Multi-Channel Network is already seeing the benefits from its television platform launched earlier this year, with its chief sales and marketing officer, Mark Frain telling The Australian Financial Review (AFR): “In July, August, September, close to 30% of our revenue has been transacted through an automated model. That's purely talking about linear television,” he said.
Pay TV still has growth left
Speaking with the AFR, Viacom International Media Network's president and chief executive Robert Bakish has brushed off August's Wall Street wobble in media shares and believes the pay television industry should be targeting two billion subscribers by 2020. "There was this ugly two days in August where Wall Street stepped back and said, 'Oh, is the business changing?' and $US50 billion ($72 billion) of market cap got taken off the media industry," Bakish said.
Hoyts to pull out seats to get more people in
The Hoyts group is about to undergo a five-year transformation plan led by chief executive Damian Keogh, which will see the business overhaul how it thinks about getting people through the front door. Keogh told The Australian, it’s a less-is-more approach in an industry that has long believed bigger was better. “It’s not every day you get to reinvent an industry,” Keogh said. “For too long in the cinema business, we’ve squeezed the value proposition for customers by putting up the cost of cinema tickets yet not changing anything in terms of comfort and the quality of the seats.”
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