A streaming business, not a TV business: What to expect tonight at Foxtel’s upfront
It's upfront season, and tonight the Foxtel Group will be revealing its big plans and plays for 2024. Andrew Murray, head of trading at UM Australia, takes a look at what we might expect.
This is part of Mumbrella’s coverage of the 2024 upfront season. Click here to see other articles in the series.
It is expected Foxtel will focus on a shift towards being more of a streaming business, rather than a television business.
Off the back of the success of Kayo and Binge, which have strong customer bases we could see their traditional (cable and satellite) services have a plan to move this way. There is an interest from UM team and our clients to understand how the launch of Binge has gone for their foundation clients.
There will be a key focus on their key drivers of audience, which is sport and major blockbuster entertainment programming from overseas, and locally commissioned series. With a potential shortfall of content due to the writers/actors strike over in the US, there could be impact to their offering. This will be interesting to understand.
With Seven taking the streaming rights for the AFL and the cricket from late next year, there could also be an impact on the Foxtel audiences on these key sporting properties. I expect that Foxtel will address this, given their significance.
As the conversation with our UM clients moves towards Total Screens, it will be critical for Foxtel to come to market with their solution to measure this across their ecosystem, especially in the interim if they do in fact move towards a streaming business.
The industry will be interested to see from Foxtel the advancements in high value audience targeting opportunities using their customer data and that from their data partners – both existing and new.
Foxtel’s upfront is on tonight in Sydney. Mumbrella will have all the news tomorrow morning.
