Opinion

Australian television is at a crossroads

Lee Stephens, executive chair at Meerkat Media, argues the Australian television industry is facing a similar battle to the one print media dealt with a decade earlier.

LEE STEPHENS

April 16, 2025 11:27

Australian television is at a crossroads

Lee Stephens

Last month, prolific Signal media commentator, Ben Shepherd, predicted that TV in Australia may only have three years of viable profitability left.

This prediction followed Kim Portrate’s departure from Think TV and Paramount 10 stepping away from the peak body, launched a decade ago to promote TV’s dominance in influencing consumer consideration and purchase.

Importantly, Think TV commissioned valuable research on the power of ‘addressable TV’ being the power of linear and on-demand TV viewership combined. On the split of Think TV, Shepard noted that “TV operators need to be working more closely together than ever. They appear on the outside to be splintering even more.”

It’s important to point out that Think TV is still operating, however there are reasonable concerns around who Think TV represents.

Foxtel and SBS, with prolific streaming and linear advertising, never joined the group. The ViacomCBS (now Paramount) 2017 purchase of the 10 Network, and establishment of a separate sales team in 2019 was questionable, largely due to the new group’s extensive streaming assets and international footprint. That left the Seven and Nine networks as the key supporters of Think TV – and its mandate.

The horse has well and truly bolted.

Australian TV is at a crossroads

At lightning speed, Paramount has gone it alone outside Think TV. Discovery’s Max launched last month, and Amazon’s ad buying tool Complete TV is set to disrupt the programmatic TV market further, sign posting the full-scale fragmentation of the total video market. This is a fragmentation that the Australian free-to-air networks cannot avoid.

TV now faces the immediate challenges faced by print advertising a decade ago.  The grim reality for print was that a dollar earned on traditional media became 25c online, at best.

Nine’s new exclusive representation agreement with Discovery’s Max is important for the industry. Nine clearly understands that the overall video advertising market is expanding faster than BVOD and linear.  The decision to team with Max’s premium library, which compliments Nine’s premium content, is genius and creates synergies and scale with its local content. Max is the perfect partner for the Nine network and an elegant way for the latter to concede the value of new streaming technologies.

Lee Stephens

There a many elephants left in the room. OZTAM’s VOZ, created for all the right reasons, has endured a torturous development process due to many broadcast stakeholders, and must have legitimate concerns around its future direction. The VOZ platform, based on Trade Desk technology, doesn’t integrate well with new streaming platforms despite being housed on The Trade Desk: a global leader in streaming video of all types.

Then there is Google and Youtube.

Inevitably, because there is not enough scale in local quality video content, whether streaming, linear or BVOD, Google is the largest recipient of Australian advertisers’ investment. Video advertising has become Australia’s largest digital media segment. However, the world’s most powerful digital companies now want to distribute local-made content, royalty-free, in an attempt to justify tariffs on Australian content creators.

The result would be catastrophic for Australia’s content creators.