News this week of Ten’s deepening relationship with Foxtel should be a sign of things to come in the TV space.
Sadly instead of working together, more often than not we see a win-at-all-cost-no-matter-what mentality being employed by broadcasters which isn’t sustainable in the TV market.
Too often in the free-to-air space, ego prevails as the networks - Seven and Nine especially - set out to destroy each other’s ‘special events’, regardless of the collateral damage.
Earlier this year we saw the egos come out to play when Seven ran a 15 minute 6pm news bulletin so it could air the Sunday Night siege special 15 minutes prior to the 60 Minutes siege special. The result was splitting the audience right down the middle.
Neither show exceeded 1.3 million viewers.
The precedent was set for this in 2014 when Nine ran its Schapelle Corby telemovie against Seven’s two part INXS mini-series. Both programs had significant production dollars invested in them, as is the case with any local production, yet this bravado meant neither program surpassed two million viewers in overnight data.
Events of this nature incur a ‘special event’ rate for advertisers based on the fact they are expected to rate, and rate well.
But knowing what the program is going up against would immediately negate this premium. And if this sort of competition continues, networks will stop creating event TV as they cannot possibly expect to see a positive financial return.
Of course this isn’t the only competition in the TV space having an impact on bottom lines.
2013 seemed to be the year of social TV, but instead of piggy-backing off a current behavior such as Twitter (which would have cost a lot less in terms of build cost), each network tried to launch their own platforms like Fango, JumpIn and Zeebox.
Since then, these platforms have either closed down, been rewritten at significant cost or rebranded because the first version didn’t deliver. Talk about a waste of money.
There’s also the unlevel playing field being dictated by reach rules. The Broadcasting Services Act's audience reach rule says a person cannot have a commercial broadcasting license allowing access to more than 75% of the Aussie population. Many think this rule is outdated. I tend to agree.
Nine’s Peter Wiltshire recently made the point addressing this will allow networks to work through reforms to live stream content. This is great, but once again we will see all of the networks going against each other to refine their platforms at significant expense and limited return.
If the egos could be left in the office, greater efficiencies could be realised by working together to develop a universal environment where all networks split the development cost and would then share in the ad revenue of both live and back catalogue content.
Consumers would benefit from a superior experience that would mean they hopefully don’t stray as much toward paid streaming services, and time spent on site would increase as viewers are given the choice across all content.
By working together in this manner, with a standardised interface, it would fast-track the development and adoption of a universal standard of audience measurement across linear TV and streaming services. This would open up further opportunity for programmatically traded and targeted advertising.
It’s not about the networks colluding, but they need to work together for the sake of the industry.
Surely the Free TV body would be a perfect organisation to facilitate such processes.
Part of what makes us the lucky country is that all Australians have the ability to view significant sporting events and entertainment free of charge. But if media organisations can’t get past the mentality of dominating each other, whatever the cost, there will be nothing left.
Left with no choice but to pay for all of our content, the local industry will wither as a result.