Tag Archive for: Apple

War of the SVODs World

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Well it’s happening. The SVOD wars have really kicked off.

Apple TV+ debuted in New Zealand on 1 November with 14 original shows. Very much a tortoise approach from Apple, and you don’t have to pay for it for a year if you’ve bought an Apple product recently. Otherwise you’re up for $8.99/month.

Disney+ meanwhile will be off like a hare at the starting gates, launching more than 600 movies and shows from Day 1, being 12 November (19 Nov. in NZ). Expect every household in the country with kids to at least consider adding a subscription at $9.99/month.

NBCUniversal’s Peacock will soft launch in April 2020 with 15,000 hours of programming, while HBO Max comes online in May with more than 10,000 hours of programming.

Netflix is already feeling the heat.

FilmTake reports that Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in the U.S. since they started in 2011. It has likely reached saturation in the market, and we can expect to see the massive international growth of Netflix to slow or halt, or worse for them, decline.

We all thought Netflix was shaking the screen industry to its core, and it has. But it was primarily Google and Facebook that was impacting on New Zealand’s Free-to-Air market, taking advertising dollars away from TV screens.

The initial streaming entities in NZ did contribute to a decline in Free-to-Air viewership, but our Free-to-Air market was still holding up with significant numbers of New Zealanders continuing to watch mainstream TV. But is that going to be the case now with Disney+ and Apple+ in the market, together with Netflix, Amazon Prime, Neon, and Lightbox and with others to come?

You have to imagine that Neon and Lightbox are fretting about their continued existence, unless Neon has done a deal to retain HBO content and possibly keep HBO Max out of the NZ market. Spark-owned Lightbox will most likely be the first casualty unless their strategy has sport and other offerings in the wings. Spark has the All Blacks and cricket afterall. Unlike Peacock, who is mooted to pursue sport, news and live programming, Spark doesn’t have the programming and financial resources of NBC and Unversal to draw upon. It’s rumoured though that Lightbox is for sale. You’d need big cojones to step into that space , or cash+ and programming+. Streamers who don’t have studio majors and/or their parents as backers are really at a disadvantage. With Netflix now paying a premium to license shows because they are losing the content owned by their competitors, you can’t imagine our locally-owned streamers having deep enough pockets to play in the big leagues. And how much longer will our broadcasters be able to access the best of international product?

At TVNZ, Kevin Kendrick is focusing on more NZ content to differentiate its Free-to-Air and OnDemand brands and help to avoid the price wars on the international scene for programming. This is an area they are likely to be able to call their own, as we can’t expect the international SVODs to commission much here unless they are forced to as the Australians are seriously contemplating making them do. With reality TV to undoubtedly feature highly in the offering, is TVNZ really going to be able to keep NZ viewers in good numbers?

What about Three? Only the woman upstairs knows what’s going to happen there. The gossip: it’s going to be bought by… someone.

Kris Faafoi’s decision about what to do with the soon-to-be loss-making TVNZ and with public broadcasting becomes even more critical now.

And just as this is all happening, NZ On Air CEO Jane Wrightson resigns to become the new Retirement Commissioner.

Jane has done a fantastic job navigating NZ On Air through the tumultuous changes that have impacted on broadcasting in the 12 years she’s been at the helm. But has she been prescient?

In this now constantly changing screen industry world, we’ll undoubtedly find out if NZ On Air gets retired before Jane runs her course in her new job. We’ll certainly learn whether or not Netflix will survive. If you are a producer on a multi-year pay down schedule for the content you sold them, you are going to be hoping somebody will buy Netflix out rather than it going under. As of 30 September, Netflix reported US$12.43 billion in debt and they are adding to it to keep the originals and higher-priced acquisitions coming. That US$292 Netflix share price is definitely going to take a hit sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, hunker down and get binge watching. There’s going to be more than enough for everyone with one, two or three SVOD subscriptions… for a very long time.

Tui Ruwhiu
Executive Director

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Where to From Here?

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The Screen Sector Strategy has announced the dates of its intended hui in 3 locales to gather industry input into a strategy document for the New Zealand Screen Industry. This will be taken to Government in the first half of 2020.

This is an important opportunity for every individual to give their ten cents worth on how they would like to see the direction of the screen industry go.

The DEGNZ board has put together a list of questions for members to help stimulate your ideas. You can find the Guild questionnaire available here to download. Please do send your responses back to us at admin@deganz.co.nz with ‘Questionnaire’ in the subject line.

Below are some recent developments that could contribute to your thinking.

The Spinoff reported in an article on Saturday that for the foreseeable future, TVNZ will not report a dividend to government—essentially, TVNZ’s profitability is way down and is likely to remain so. The impact of Google and Facebook on onscreen advertising revenues is a major factor in this, as well as the advent of Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) services such as Netflix and the fragmentation of the media market.

In the same article, The Spinoff reported an unprecedented call-out by NZ On Air to all the major news providers to attend a meeting to discuss the long term sustainability of journalism.

Across the ditch in Australia, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Final Report into Digital Platforms addresses this topic amongst others. Key findings include:

  • The availability of a wide range of high-quality news and journalism provides significant benefits to Australian society and is important for the healthy functioning of democracy.
  • News and journalism risk under-provision for a number of reasons, including the general inability of commercial news media businesses to capture the broader social benefits of journalism.
  • Media businesses, particularly traditional print (now print/online) publishers, have experienced a significant fall in advertising revenue as advertisers follow audiences who have migrated online to access news and other content. This has coincided with strong growth in online advertising, which now accounts for half of all advertising expenditure. Google and Facebook together account for nearly two-thirds of online advertising expenditure.

These aren’t earth-shattering revelations, but clearly highlight the fundamentals of what we all are wrestling with and that are driving TVNZ, Mediaworks, Fairfax, and NZME amongst others to the wall.

The Australians have also called for a levy on streamers to fund local content, the need to maintain broadcast TV quotas, and an end to cuts for screen funding bodies and public broadcasters as previously written about in the Guild blog here.

Funding cuts have impacted heavily on Screen Australia and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In New Zealand in comparison, our funding bodies (NZFC, NZ On Air) have had relatively static funding for years, with more and more calls upon it.

As many of you will now be aware, there is international production work to be shot in New Zealand coming out of our ears. We are already seeing a shortage of experienced personnel and crew rates and other production costs are rising while New Zealand budgets stay the same. The question of how local production can survive and thrive in the face of the onslaught of offshore work arriving is vexing a number of us.

We are at a crucial time for both the local and international screen industries. There are seismic shifts still to come as Disney, WarnerMedia, Apple and other streaming services come online and continue to shake broadcast and theatrical to their foundations.

The Screen Sector Strategy work now underway needs to be completed quickly and effectively if we are to have a sustainable industry in New Zealand that benefits from international production and contributes to the development of local screen content and Kiwi screen IP.

Please share your thoughts on where to from here with us at the Guild, at the Screen Sector Strategy hui and with submissions, so that a well thought out strategy is distilled that will work for us all.

Tui Ruwhiu
Executive Director

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