‘Instilling confidence despite turbulent content deals’: Reactions to Foxtel’s 2025 Upfront
Foxtel Group announced a slew of exciting developments for 2025 at its Upfronts this week, including the launch of its long-awaited audience measurement system, the inclusion of live sports and news channels on BINGE, and a number of new local productions.
We asked the industry what they think about Foxtel’s new offerings.
Foxtel Media CEO Mark Frain
Marelle Salib, chief investment officer, OMD
Foxtel’s recent upfront event set a high benchmark with a series of impactful announcements, emphasising enhanced value and outcomes for advertisers.
Foxtel is at the forefront of pioneering new measurement techniques and is launching several research projects to validate the effectiveness of their comprehensive asset suite. This initiative extends to collaborations within the Video Futures Collective (VFC), which includes industry leaders such as Amazon, Samsung Ads, SBS on Demand, YouTube, and Vevo. Foxtel recognises the importance of data points that transcend traditional media metrics for optimising screen usage within any media mix. Their partnership with Amplified Intelligence and OMG aims to understand the impact of attention, providing insights that drive client impact and effectiveness beyond mere reach.
Foxtel’s extensive content offerings across multiple platforms are poised to retain and grow their audience base. The addition of sports and news to Binge’s content lineup is expected to increase audience engagement and expand their subscriber base, offering advertisers enhanced opportunities to reach a broader audience, including sports enthusiasts. Foxtel’s collaborative efforts and forward-looking agenda will continue to advance their ambitions, offering advertisers scalable, measurable, and impactful opportunities to drive business growth.
Sarah Keith, managing director of Involved Media
The new measurement is a huge step forward for clients as they are now able to trade properly with the detailed information that will be available. This will undoubtedly be a key driver in continuing to increase Foxtel Media’s share of total video revenue.
With the VFC in a supporting role to elevate the measurement standards and the promoting impact of cross-screen Foxtel Media are cementing their position as industry leaders as they continue to lead the way with significant investment in building data capability, quickly. They are in a strong position going into 2025.
Peter Toone, managing director of Principal Media Group
The streaming market is evolving rapidly, and the increased opportunity for advertisers on these platforms makes the VFC’s announcements particularly interesting. Consistency in measurement, variable ad-loads and platform effectiveness are questions faced by agencies and clients alike.
Anything that helps to address these challenges will be welcomed by the industry. Amazon joining, with their global scale and local team, only adds further weight to this initiative.
Daniel Cutrone – managing partner of Avenue C
Foxtel delivered a strong case this evening instilling confidence despite turbulent content deals (Max/HBO), as well as revolutionising its measurement standards in 2025.
Whilst there was no mention of how the introduction of Max may impact the Foxtel Group in the long-term, both House of Dragon and The Penguin featured within their upcoming programming reels. Instead, the Foxtel Group focussed more on its original content from returning franchises of Selling Houses Australia, The Twelve, Colin From Accounts, as well new properties: Billion Dollar Playground and The Last Anniversary to name a few.
To help curb any future churn, Foxtel also announced that Binge was adding women’s domestic sport as well as news properties Sky News, CNN, CNBC, BBC. This would uniquely place Binge as an Entertainment, News and Sports Streaming platform, without cannibalising on Kayo subscribers with only 10% cross-over.
Foxtel’s strength however is firmly placed within Sport, and this was reinforced with its ongoing broadcast and tech innovations, breadth of commentary team, ad-free during live play, and its exclusive content strategy with the AFL Super Saturday to win over fans for longer.
Overall, Foxtel has a challenging retention strategy ahead in 2025 – with even more competition than ever! Meanwhile as the business shifts its linear TV metrics to a new single-source digital currency it may struggle in the short-term, that is until all the pieces are tried and tested to provide true de-duplicated scale and ROI across the entire group.
Foxtel Media CEO Mark Frain and Foxtel Group CEO Patrick Delany
Georga Payne -Chief Investment Officer, Woolworths Group
Foxtel’s upfront was held at the impressive recently restored White Bay Power Station in Rozelle. Foxtel one of the first to host an event in this historic, double-height-building to announce new content, new partnerships, and new bundles.
We heard of the addition of sport to Binge given current low duplication of Kayo subscribers, with main AFL and NRL games available each week plus more women’s sport including WBBL and netball.
Given overall growth in sport audiences and Kayo continuing to grow in subscriber numbers with avid sports fans, makes sense Foxtel double down on their investment in licence rights and breadth of sports talent (and get an early start on other video streamers). The addition of select sport and News follows global moves from other streamers to connect sports to their offering, promising more live viewership and more sticky viewers. New local productions also aim to provide tentpole viewing moments for Binge throughout the year. This move expands Binge’s content catalogue, in a year where even more streaming competition will be coming to market.
With churn in streaming video market, can see benefit in bundling Kayo and Netflix. It is a tough economic climate and everyone is chasing growth. Given levels of maturity Netflix looking to target more cost sensitive subscribers and likely seeing benefit in tech play which Foxtel have done well to pioneer. Hubbl being offered as part of these bundles to offer ease of viewing across apps and live TV.
Kantar also announced as new measurement for Foxtel with other Video providers, Amazon, You Tube, Samsung Ads alluding to joining in time. Agencies and clients have a long history with different measurement across channels, so do not expect this move to adversely impact ad spend.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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It is appreciated that the transparency on the measurement piece that is being brought to market with Kantar is being brought to market (and it should be supported by having additional vendors measure and show the effectiveness of video buys, digital or linear). Also, consolidated video buying is an interesting proposition (despite agencies and clients having existing deals with YT and other video vendors). There is something to be said about the amount of salt that was floating around on the night. It made ocean water appear to be drinkable.
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