Nearly time to turn off the transmitters. The viewing shift is happening faster than you think
Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade (plus an update on the Unmade Index further down; market sentiment seems to have turned against media stocks again).
If you’re the sort of person who leaves things to the last moment, then this is your final reminder. RE:Made – Retail Media Unmade is this afternoon. If you’re in Sydney, it’s not quite too late to buy a ticket online, or on the door. Experiencing the indignity of wearing a hand-written lanyard is a sacrifice worth making in order to get on top of a key media trend.
Television at a turning point
TV’s inflection point is coming. Any time now (or maybe it happened in the last few weeks), the proportion of the Australian population who watch television the traditional way will fall below half for the first time.
But as fast as traditional ways of watching are falling, new viewing habits are forming – or that’s what the data in Think TV’s regularly produced Fact Pack suggests.
Unmade Substack
I think the state we’re in now with linear TV is where we were 5-10 years ago with newspapers – trying to predict when the cliff will arrive and it’s no longer sustainable to deliver the product this way. Newspapers seem to have solved that problem, and the legacy method survives, albeit on a different scale.
TV has already made its delivery (transmission) costs more effective by going digital (more channels, more efficient transmission methodologies) and that tactic probably still has a bit more to provide. There’s also the ongoing problem for many people that their data delivery pipe (NBN, Skylink or whatever) isn’t quite good enough for the viewing they want to do. There’s still improvements to be made there too, and that’s not really in the networks’ hands.
But eventually we’re going to be at the point where it’s cheaper to buy all the unconnected viewers an NBN subscription and a set top box than to continue to pay transmission costs.
Anyone who was in the UK when VHF 405 line TV came to an end, and the whole nation went UHF, will see a similar story playing out here.