Piracy: Networks turn to Aussie content and streaming to stem tide
Increasing the focus on local content and making more international shows available early and en-masse online are some of the ways Australia’s broadcasters are trying to combat the surge in piracy.
While figures released today show Game of Thrones was the most-pirated ever show, with Aussies leading the way, and other programs like Sherlock seeing massive declines in live audiences networks say there is an increased emphasis on homegrown shows like Channel Nine’s Love Child to keep viewers.
Mel Kansil, director of strategy for the Nine Entertainment Company, said Australian content, made available across a variety of platforms at any time through its catchup app Jump In has been a successful strategy for Nine.
“With Australian content it isn’t available until it’s broadcast and that is increasingly what we find Australian viewers want to see is homegrown content,” she told Mumbrella.
“Having that content going first on our free to air network and then available via Jump In means it is really accessible for consumers. There’s no need for them to access it in other than legal ways.”
Nine also used its catchup app Jump In to release Love Child online ahead of the broadcast, which helped build an audience for the show and win Nine 1.35m metro viewers for the launch.
“Social media was aglow,” Kansil said. “People were very positive around Love Child, so it helped build the free to air ratings, and that’s obviously really exciting. Also, by making the experience of accessing content really seamless, there’s little incentive to access it illegally.”
Angus Ross, director of programming at Seven, said the Seven Network takes a similar approach.
“Piracy is obviously a problem for any program not seen on the Seven Network first – that is why the backbone of our schedule is built around Australian programming – big event programming, live sport and live news,” he told Mumbrella.
According to statistics from Yahoo!7, the most popular shows on Seven’s catchup app Plus7 are Australian, with My Kitchen Rules, Home and Away and drama Winners and Losers in the top ten.
However, imported programs are harder for networks to hold on to, as Nine has seen its ratings halve for shows like Sherlock, shown weeks after the UK broadcast, and Ten had similar audience woes for Homeland despite making it available early on TenPlay.
Rebekah Horne, head of digital at Channel Ten, said Ten has been working at fast-tracking content such as Homeland by making it available 15 minutes after it aired in the US on its catchup app.
“These days, viewers increasingly want to consume content wherever they want, whenever they want,” she said.
“We can address that demand by providing a quality digital and catch-up service, and by delivering ‘day and date’ with overseas series that we know our audiences don’t want to wait for, such as Under the Dome and Homeland.”
Ross maintains piracy affects “younger, cultish, more male skewed programming”, pointing to the number of illegal downloads of shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, adding Seven’s studio partners “are working with governments to try and curb piracy as ultimately this sort of theft devalues their content”.
That content is exactly what Tony Iffland, director of television and online content at SBS, envisaged when he relaunched SBS 2 last year. He has been pushing the envelope in Australia, providing entire series back to back online after they have premiered on the station, and finding new ways to release content. The SBS film festival of 100 clicks, which created a website for all of its films to be available online for a limited time and had a total 824,000 video chapter views throughout the month of March, Iffland said.
He told Mumbrella: “We know the audience want things as quickly as possible. They don’t want to wait until next week for me, the old-fashioned scheduler to schedule it, they want it now.
“And what we have seen is you actually see more people viewing the linear stream the next week even though you’ve made available that episode in the on demand space, because it’s all about creating buzz, and momentum.
“As with Nine’s Love Child, those who watch shows early on SBS 2 will talk about it on social media lifting the ratings for linear TV.”
He added: “What I find interesting is that people still come back to a linear transmission, which says something about television as a social activity. We still like to watch things with people, we still like to talk about it, there is that social element to what we do and which is why I think television is so enduring.”
At Foxtel Bruce Meagher, director of corporate affairs, acknowledges piracy is a significant issue and is becoming more significant for broadcasters, but said they are working to make shows as widely available on as many platforms as possible early on.
“If we keep improving on the supply side, with ease of access and education, and on the other side if you have an effective sanctions regime or enforcement regime, you won’t completely wipe out piracy but you will reduce it quite substantially, not least because most people do want to do the right thing.”
Danny Bass, group investment and intelligence officer of GroupM, said it is a problem the industry has to address as a whole.
“The difference from an agency perspective is that where we thought the big shows were going to be has changed,” he said.
“The impact of the big overseas imports isn’t as prevalent as it once was but the networks have responded to that by investing very heavily in domestic shows.
“What is interesting is that the imports like Game of Thrones will get more coverage than any domestic show. Mad Men for the audience it gets still gets an enormous amount of (media) coverage compared to the domestic audience it has.”
Megan Reynolds
The other issue is the amount of advertising which renders some shows, Resurrection for example, virtually unwatchable. I suspect part of the attraction for downloaders is an absence of ad breaks.
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Nine and Seven see local production as a solution but it is expensive to produce, particularly drama and I haven’t seen them or Ten exceeding their Australian drama minimum quotas. The only way to deal with this is abandon all US Studio output deals and use the savings for domestic production but this will still cost them a lot more than those old cosy studio bulk deals. But while they maintain the anti siphoning rules for sport the biggest loser is Foxtel. But with less than 30% of domestic households having PAYTV the politicians are much wiser to protect the free to airs than succumb to Rupert even though they owe him big time.
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