Just how much trouble is Seven in? (Answer: A lot more than you probably realise)
With Seven West Media’s share price at an all-time low and debt pile close to an all-time high, the company’s ASX update yesterday revealed a tough outlook for 2020. Mumbrella’s Tim Burrowes asks what next for CEO James Warburton.
Less than four months ago, Seven’s new CEO James Warburton took to the stage at Sydney’s ICC for the most important public appearance of his career.
After his failure as boss of Network Ten, career recovery at V8 Supercars and redemption selling outdoor company APN Outdoor to JC Decaux, the moment marked his return to the top rung of Australian media.
It would require all of his his impressive sales skills to offer his customers at the Upfronts a vision of how he was going to turn around Seven West Media’s fortunes.
On the night, he delivered, promising to build on the early momentum of a series of deals revealed over the previous days.
The headwinds for commercial linear TV are obviously significant, but a look around the world at how others have diversified revenue streams away from ad dependency, evolved their business model, suggests a bigger vision is needed, no?
See Adam Crozier and ITV in the UK, for example.
Do more to originate, own the IP, sell around the world (English-speaking TV advantages with the international appeal of Australian voices) and across platforms, build franchises that live on-air, online & offline etc.
Not saying it’s at all easy to pull off, but where’s the bigger vision?
This has been coming for a long time, if it wasn’t seven, it would have been one of the others, and 10 was looking like the most likely contender for longer than was reasonably bearable.
The future of free to air television is good, but the time for change is well overdue, and with each passing year, the change needs to be more and more dramatic, even radical.
A year or so ago it needed a dramatic shift in programming, that is to say, the way programming was conducted, but now programming needs a total restructuring and a rebirth of the culture that drives it.
Television needs brave business and creative input* and the shift needed is no longer of a remedial nature, the shift now must be epic and life-saving, it must be a complete rethink and a major overhaul. Jobs must go, “non-jobs” must go first, and the greed must be sliced out like the life-threatening tumor that it is.
You can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t………………..
* Business AND creative in balance. One alone or too much of either is deleterious to the health of television.
Free to air is on it’s last legs. Viewers are moving to streaming in droves. Like radio it is a dinosaur destined to history.
Have a look at Seven West Media’s share price April fools day 2010 and compare with today. The share price has dropped a whopping 96 percent. My prediction is that Seven will go under like 9 and 10 and will be re-born, phoenix like with Murdoch doing a deal with the federal government to change the regulatory rules. Look at December or late November.
Just curious …
Is the Coalition Government still paying the license fees for the commercial networks out of taxpayer dollars ?
(while cutting funding for the ABC and cranking out crap about how the “free market magically solves all problems ?”)
And if that was a one-off, did the commercial networks see fit to repay the Australian taxpayers ?
The TV stations continue to pay too much for sporting rights. What used to be a cheap filler now has to be cross-subsidised by other programming.
When TV was a licence to print money and any problem could be solved by throwing bucket loads of money at it, this was acceptable. It isn’t now.