Succession mirrors reality – and how the drama helped save Foxtel
In this excerpt of The Weekend Mumbo, Calum Jaspan looks at how a fictional family has helped transform the Murdoch-owned Foxtel.
What a couple of days in media.
This week saw the ‘defamation trial of the decade’ almost kick off in America. Much to the chagrin and deep disappointment of media watchers across the globe, the hugely anticipated and juicy event remained an ‘almost’ as the trial was called off just as the jury had taken their seats on Tuesday.
Fox Corp and its news company, Fox News, salvaged what face it had by settling at the eleventh hour and therefore avoiding its 92-year-old chairman, Rupert Murdoch, being cross examined by Dominion Voting System’s lawyers. The face-saver only cost Murdoch’s company a mere US$787.5 million (A$1.17 billion) to settle.
If you don’t know where the story goes from here, I suggest you take a read of this Vanity Fair cover story later, which provides good additional narrative to some of the points I’d like to cover.
Added to this, Rupert’s son, Lachlan, dropped his defamation case against Australian news site Crikey two days later, just as I was boarding a 15 hour international flight (that didn’t take off).
“Murdoch himself has a very thick skin, or perhaps, […] a basic disregard for what anyone else says about him,” wrote the AFR’s Myriam Robin about senior in 2021.
He might not care, but this is the fourth time heir-apparent has sought legal recourse.
Was Crikey running a subscription drive? Errmmm… didn’t Fox just pay $1.17b for doing something similar? I guess he had to fold.
And even if that was the motive, it’s a move straight out of his father’s own playbook.
Speaking of subscriptions…
Running in parallel to the legal proceedings has been the final season of smash-hit HBO/Binge show Succession, which everyone knows is broadly drawn from the story of a certain famous media family.
What now seems clear is that the family’s real story is even more drama-fuelled than the fiction of Succession – despite the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, repeatedly insisting that the Roy family is not based on the Murdochs.
For those that can’t get enough of the real story, I wonder where they could head to get a further fix of media mogul drama?
Below, I’ll attempt to tell you how the Murdoch’s have unexpectedly reaped a windfall from the black comedy-drama, how it helped change the fortunes of family-owned subscription TV company, Foxtel, and how bad business can be good business.
Loose lips sink ships
One of the most illuminating anecdotes from the Vanity Fair article is how seemingly paranoid the Murdoch family is about Succession and its popularity. During divorce settlements between Rupert and his ex-wife, Jerry Hall, she was issued with a legal letter instructing her not to feed any story ideas to the show’s script writers.
The was further reinforced when Gabriel Sherman revealed that Lachlan (Rupert’s eldest son, CEO of Fox Corp and Executive Chairman of News Corp) told his father that brother James was also feeding ideas to the Succession writers. The Murdoch clan is now riven with suspicion.
And of course this very public spat has consumed the media everywhere – particularly the media sections and writers locally and across the globe.
So when the media section of the Murdoch-owned The Australian reported the launch of a new streaming service, HBO Max, a few heads were turned. “US media giant Warner Bros Discovery will launch its own streaming service in Australia in 2024, one of the company’s leading executives has confirmed,” the exclusive splash read in its print edition on 3 April.
The story was an interview with the regional boss of Warner Brothers Discovery (which owns HBO), James Gibbons, who was in Melbourne at the Australian Grand Prix with Foxtel to celebrate the two companies’ deal extension. And he did so alongside Succession star ‘Cousin Greg’ (Nicholas Braun).
The Australian, 3 April
The Australian was reporting an HBO breakaway would launch in a year locally, in what could potentially scupper Foxtel’s (majority owned by News Corp) own renewed deal, announced less than four weeks prior.
To paint a picture of its importance, when Foxtel last secured the rights to HBO content in 2020, it cost an estimated $200 million. That same year, Binge launched with its HBO content, which has played a key role in driving the 1.375 million paying subscribers it has today.
It was left to Foxtel to quash The Australian’s story. And when I contacted Foxtel’s comms department, they told me Gibbons had been “misquoted”. The online piece can still be found on The Australian’s website, though it looks vastly different to its original form.
The same story, 21 April
Foxtel’s life jacket
In a timely chat this week, I spoke with Foxtel Media’s CEO, Mark Frain on the Mumbrellacast, three weeks into the launch of its ad-tier on Binge.
Frain stressed the importance of relying on ‘big ticket’ hit shows that drive subscriptions in a highly competitive market, in particular, content it can heavily market. Meaning particularly HBO’s Succession, White Lotus and the likes.
Locally, the increasingly fragmented streaming category now includes Binge, Stan, Netflix, Paramount+, Disney+, Amazon Prime, as well as the ad-supported services.
Streaming services can no longer rely on deep back catalogues to keep users paying upwards of $15 a month. Particularly while the back catalogues of studios such as Paramount and Disney (and maybe soon HBO?) shift in-house.
Given its value, Binge’s marketing and advertising of HBO shows has been pretty visible, as Frain says it needs to be. While I couldn’t source the exact total amount, Foxtel was the single largest digital ad spender in 2022 according to Pathmatics, spending $51,450,700 across the calendar year, almost $20 million more than second place.
With Foxtel set-top box customers in rapid decline, the bulk of its marketing spend is now directed towards its golden children, Binge and Kayo. Just check any billboard in Australia’s airports and you’ll see Binge ads plastered everywhere.
I asked Foxtel for some figures on how Succession is performing locally, four weeks into the final season’s run, but it said it didn’t have any figures yet (it would supply me), nor did it have a timeline for any.
The fictional star of Succession, Logan Roy
Episode four, the most recent, had a total overnight audience on Foxtel of 95,000 on Monday (across three separate broadcasts) with the first episode, almost a month ago having 56,000 BVOD viewers to date. It isn’t a big number, but keep in mind Foxtel Now (its BVOD service) only has 177,000 paying customers.
The company did say that Succession’s season 4 premiere more than doubled the previous seasons’, with January this year proving a record month for Binge, bolstered by an average audience of over 1 million per episode for The Last of Us (HBO).
While this is just a snapshot, it illustrates how Foxtel has completely shifted its customer base in recent years.
Foxtel’s streaming customer base (paid) now totals 2.678 million as of 31 December, up 25% on the year prior. Binge and Kayo numbers are climbing annually, while Foxtel Now is down 16% across the year, and Flash continues to operate in its own niche.
You can expect this number will likely approach the three million mark when News Corp drops its next results in May, with many AFL and NRL fans switching their Kayo accounts back on.
Total paying customers at Foxtel totals 4.329 million right now, with broadcast and commercial customers (1.631 million) down 8% year-on-year.
The point here, as Frain said on the podcast, is that four years ago less than 10 percent of Foxtel’s customer base was streamers, and now it accounts for two-thirds. On that basis, Foxtel should be commended for an entirely impressive shift in the company’s strategy.
Foxtel’s strategy of sport and entertainment is on the boil nicely, and that exact combination was key in helping it secure several more years of the lucrative content.
As Warner Brothers Discovery’s Gibbons said a few weeks back: “It’s really important when you are trying to raise awareness of shows like Succession you are working with someone who has big sports rights.”
So it’s all part of the plan.
For the Murdochs, who are seemingly paranoid about the success of Succession (if we’re to go by Vanity Fair), it’s truly ironic how the Roys have played a critical role in Foxtel’s transformation.
Calum Jaspan is acting editor at Mumbrella.
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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