TELEVISION 20 QUESTIONS 202 5 25 VIEWPOINTS Rethinking small-screen media in Australia Spreading Fictions: Distributing Stories in the Online Age is an Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project [LP100200656] supported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Screen Australia. The chief investigators are Jock Given, Professor of Media and Communications, The Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne and Gerard Goggin, Professor of Media and Communications, The University of Sydney. Partner Investigators: Georgie McClean, Head of Strategy and Communications, Screen Australia Rebecca Heap, Head of TV Strategy & Digital Products, ABC TV This report was written by Jock Given, Michael Brealey and Cathy Gray, from interviews conducted by Michael Brealey and Jock Given. Rosemary Curtis provided research assistance. Many thanks to the ABC, Screen Australia and the Australian Research Council for their generous support of the project and to all the interviewees for their contributions to this report. Any views expressed in this report are those of the authors and interviewees and not necessarily those of the Industry Partners or other organisations. Publication editing and page layout: Cathy Gray Cover design: Screen Australia Published by Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, PO Box 218 Hawthorn, Victoria, 3122 The text in this report is released subject to a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence (Licence). This means, in summary, that you may reproduce, transmit and distribute the text, provided that you do not do so for commercial purposes, and provided that you attribute the text as extracted from Television 2025: Rethinking Small-screen Media in Australia, Swinburne Institute for Social Research, 2015. You must not alter, transform or build upon the text in this publication. Your rights under the Licence are in addition to any fair dealing rights which you have under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cwlth). For further terms of the Licence, please see http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. © Swinburne Institute for Social Research, May 2015 ISBN 978-0-9875930-5-4 This report is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/400201, or http://doi.org/10.4225/50/555A74687FAF1 Television 2025: Rethinking small-screen media in Australia: May 2015 2 About this project ‘Spreading Fictions: Distributing Stories in the Online Age’ is an Australian Research Council Linkage project supported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Screen Australia. The central research question is: ’How do Australians get their audiovisual stories and how might they get them in the future?’ Responding to the increased emphasis on audiences and distribution in government policy about audiovisual media, the goal is to quantify the changing ways Australians are watching and engaging with audiovisual stories across the cinema, free-to-air and subscription television, consumer/DVD, online and mobile sectors. The focus on narrative fiction content reflects the high priority given by successive governments in Australia and overseas to policies encouraging the making, promotion, screening and discussion of local audiovisual works, especially feature films, adult and children’s TV dramas and documentaries. These policies are based on the perceived cultural importance of these formats and their high cost relative to the revenue-earning capacity of national markets. Challenges to these underlying economics are coming from at least three related directions: technology, audience behaviour and business models. Running from 2010 to 2015, the project is producing a series of publications analysing audiovisual distribution in Australia. The first report, published in April 2012, explored online video, a sector where the services offered, the behaviour of users and the ways of measuring them are changing rapidly and profoundly. The second report, about cinema, was published in June 2013. Here, the basic user experience and the methods for measuring it have been relatively stable for a long time. Decades of data about cinema admissions, box office revenue, numbers of theatres, screens and seats were available, enabling us to do a much longer- range analysis of the period from the mid-1980s to the Online Age. This report, Television 2025, looks at small-screen media in Australia at a moment that we think might turn out to be decisive for the sector. It adopts a different method to examine the future. The previous two reports were based around analysis of original data. This one is built from interviews with 25 people who work in the industry. Their responses are summarised in the introduction that follows; the report itself is a montage of their own words. This approach is designed to capture diverse intelligence about the future development of the sector and to present it in an accessible way. Like the other two reports, Television 2025 needs to be understood as one part of the larger project analysing several other overlapping audiovisual sectors – cinema, retail/DVD, online and mobile. Jock Given May 2015 Television 2025: Rethinking small-screen media in Australia: May 2015 3 Contents INTRODUCTION: Rethinking small-screen media in Australia ............................... 6 The interviewees .................................................................................................................................. 12 The questions ...................................................................................................................................... 14 [RETRO]VISION: Recent trends and highlights ................................................... 15 What trend in television or video has most surprised you over the past few years? ........................... 15 Personally, what’s the most interesting or satisfying or surprising experience you’ve had with television or video in the last year? ...................................................................................... 18 Great shows… ............................................................................................................................. 18 New and evolving services… ...................................................................................................... 19 Events and encounters… ............................................................................................................ 20 BOX: MEDIA COMPANIES OF THE FUTURE ........................................................................... 20 THE FUTURE STARTS NOW: Influencers, technologies, challenges ....................... 21 What person or organisation will have a significant influence on the business in the next year? .................................................................................................................................. 21 BOX: STREAMING VIDEO PLATFORMS – WILL THERE BE A ‘WINNER’? ................................. 24 What technology trend do you think will be particularly significant in TV and video in the next few years? .......................................................................................................................... 25 Broadband speeds and pricing… ............................................................................................... 25 Platforms – mobile and more ...................................................................................................... 25 Interfaces and user experiences … ............................................................................................. 26 BOX: NEW PLATFORMS ADD DISTINCTIVE VOICES ............................................................... 27 BOX: WHAT IS ‘PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING’? ................................................................ 28 In your current role, what do you fear most? What keeps you awake at night? .................................. 28 BOX: AN SVOD ‘GOLDRUSH’? .............................................................................................. 31 EVOLVING BUSINESSES: Relationships, rules and business models .................... 32 How will relationships between producers and distributors need to change over the next few years? .................................................................................................................................... 32 There will be more vertical integration and consolidation .......................................................... 32 Even without consolidation, producers and distributors will have to work together more closely ............................................................................................................................ 33 For producers, new distribution opportunities are emerging but sales and financing models need to change .......................................................................................... 34 Business models underpinning content creation will reflect new ways of valuing and trading IP ............................................................................................... 35 BOX: WRESTLING OVER RIGHTS ........................................................................................... 35 New financing and distribution options bring new challenges .................................................. 36 TV broadcasters have to change their business model to survive ............................................... 37 BOX: CONTROLLING CONTENT – OWNING IP ......................................................................