Encore Annual 2010: Year in tv
It may not have been entirely obvious at the time, but 2010 was the year Australia’s TV landscape changed. Tim Burrowes reports.
With the exception of its launch more than half a century ago, 2010 saw the most dramatic change for television in the shortest amount of time.
It was driven by the launch of the free to air digital channels. Their arrival may not yet have changed the landscape as much as subscription television did, but their impact has been felt much more swiftly.
The first of the spin-off digital channels launched in the second half of 2009, with Ten opting for sports content with One, Seven launching 7Two and Nine choosing Go!
With digital penetration initially relatively low, their impact in 2009 was initially minimal, but by the beginning of 2010 it was becoming more obvious.
The opening weeks of the 2010 ratings year saw lower numbers across the board. Observers were divided on whether the phenomenon was caused by changes to the OzTam ratings panels, cannibalisation of the primary channels by the new arrivals, or simply changes to viewing habits as media fragmentation accelerated.
In the end it was – at least in part – something else entirely. The slow return to Australian screens of local content in 2010 because networks feared to bring out their big guns until the winter Olympics were out of the way.
But come April, ratings finally improved – not entirely, but enough to be a relief to the TV industry. However, the days when a hit has to rate more than 2m metro viewers are gone. 1.5m is doing very well now. Indeed, 2010 was the year where anything above 1m became an acceptable performance.
And to achieve a hit, it almost always had to be local content.
For Nine, it was Underbelly. For Seven it was Packed To The Rafters and for Ten it was – of course – MasterChef.
Underbelly: The Golden Mile debuted with 2.237m viewers.
But local content was not a universal winner. The same week, the return of Seven’s Australia’s Got Talent found itself beaten into second place by Nine’s expensive UK acquisition of Top Gear. (Later in the year, Nine was to find that its local version of Top Gear was itself no match in viewer affections for the original.)
Also launching in April was the return of Nine’s variety show Hey Hey It’s Saturday. Despite a 1.5m debut, ratings quickly faded to well below 1m. The show was rested
half way through the series and returned in the less competitive Saturday night slot. It remains to be seen if it will get another series in 2011.
Ten, meanwhile, double dipped with MasterChef. The second series of the cooking competition continued to draw massive audiences. The final was viewed by 3.962m
viewers – a number that only five months later already seems inconceivably large.
The final also included a trailer for Junior MasterChef. The public reaction was so positive that Ten brought forward its planned launch date for the show until before its Commonwealth Games coverage.
It debuted with 2.2m, but lost ground after being put on pause for the games, which was itself a disappointment for Ten in terms of numbers. But Junior MasterChef still finished with a healthy finale of nearly 2m. It was enough to earn the show a recommission.
By then though, the digital channels were beginning to bite – although not all of them.
RISE OF THE DIGITALS
Ten’s sports channel only tended to deliver decent audiences for its Sunday night Formula One races. The network’s management has always argued that One’s presence is strategic – to stake out territory ready for when more content becomes available and the antisiphoning rules changed to allow more content to be broadcast on the secondary channels.
Another disappointment in audience terms was ABC News 24. Launched just in time for the election, the channel languishes with an audience share of less than 1 percent.
For Nine though, Go has gradually gained ground, driven by US imports. Nine’s newer secondary channel GEM (General Entertainment and Movies) has been slower to take.
It was the same story for Seven’s 7Two and Mate. By the end of 2010, only Ten is yet to jump with its next channel, although it announced that Eleven would launch in January – and with the bold move of switching The Simpsons and Neighbours across from Ten, with an extended run of national and local news to fill the hole.
Despite the incomplete digital line-up, the audience fragmentation is already well under way.
On election night, more than 22 percent of viewers turned away from the primary channels’ wall-to-wall politics and opted for the digital channels. Since then, it has becoming increasingly normal to see the digital channels take a 15-20 percent share of viewing.
OFFSCREEN DRAMA
In the main because of this, subscription TV’s growth slowed dramatically in 2010.
A further frustration for the pay TV sector came in an extraordinary act of largesse by the government towards the free TV networks. Despite the fact that there is already a legal quota for Australian made content, media minister Stephen Conroy decided to hand the free to airs a rebate amounting to around $250m in order to – he said – help them go on producing local content. The move infuriated their rivals, many of whom believed the deal amounted to a bribe to the networks to ensure the digital switchover took place in order to free up valuable spectrum that the government will then be able to auction.
Bound up in all this was the government’s review of the anti-siphoning legislation – designed to keep sport available to viewers for free. Critics claimed that the list was too long and was being abused by free to air networks who often chose not to air events or to do so on a time delay. This reached fever pitch when Seven aired the Bathurst V8s under an increasing delay in order to fit in more ads. At the time of Encore going to press, Conroy appeared to be days away from making an announcement
on the review after months of delays.
There were also ownership dramas. The big one was for Ten. James Packer surprised the market by buying nearly 20 percent of the company. Soon he and friend Lachlan Murdoch, who was due to take a stake in that investment – were on the board and effectively in control.
Questions were quickly asked about Ten’s previously announced content plans for 2011, in particular its ambitious news plans.
The network made one early change of direction – shelving its plans for performance spectacular Don’t Stop Believing, which was to have been a Shine Australia production. This was despite it being central to the network’s public launch of its 2011 schedule.
But the coming year holds challenges for all the networks.
Seven just about clung on to its number one network crown in 2010. Next year will be tougher.
Ten has the most to prove with new ownership, Eleven yet to launch and its news strategy unproven.
Nine will probably see its parent company PBL float on the ASX.
Pay TV will need a miracle to avoid its subscriber numbers going backwards for the first time.
SBS will continue to struggle for relevance, and funds.
The rise of the digital channels often sees SBS1 beaten into sixth or seventh place.
For the ABC, things are brighter. Strong signals have been sent that the national broadcaster is ready to start commissioning drama again. The organisation is also
reasonably well placed in the digital battleground.
And digital TV will continue to rise. For local content, this is yet to play out. There are as yet no quotas on Australian content for the secondary channels. For now they tend to be filled with US and UK archive material.
But not all households can yet receive the digital channels. And even those that can are sometimes limited to the standard definition channels. The day will come soon though where there is nothing to choose between them and the main channels. In practice, that’s likely to be next year, rather than the 2013 analogue switchoff.
The moment when less than half of TV viewers are watching the big three is imminent. That will have big implications for local content. As yet, there are few legal
safeguards. And despite local content’s ability to draw ratings, it is also expensive to make.
Fragmented audiences are a certainty next year. But the question of whether they will watch Australian made shows is as yet unanswerable.
