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Presto to end in January

Seven / Foxtel streaming platform Presto will end with subscribers moving to a refreshed Foxtel Play service.

prestoJoint Foxtel / Seven owned streaming platform Presto will cease in January, with subscribers to be moved to a refreshed Foxtel Play platform.

Seven West Media is exiting the joint venture, which launched in March 2014. But the service has struggled against the might of Netflix and Nine / Fairfax owned Stan.

Tim Worner, CEO and Managing Director, Seven West Media, said: “We look forward to continuing to work closely with Foxtel, in particular in the creation of new programming content.”

Peter Tonagh, Foxtel CEO, said “It has been great working with the team at Seven on Presto and we look forward to future collaborations. We are delighted to be able to offer Presto subscribers access to the new look Foxtel Play, which we know will be highly attractive to them.”

From December, existing Foxtel Play customers will be transferred to the new pricing, with the package that “best aligns with their current service.”

The new service will have five different entry level tiers to match viewers’ interests including Drama and Entertainment packs priced at $15 per month each or $25 for both, while at the $10 per month level, there will be one option for Lifestyle, one for Documentary and one for Kids. In addition, customers will be able to take the Sports tier for an extra $25 per month and the Movies tier for an additional $20 per month, effectively reducing the cost of Sport to as little as $35 per month.

Both Presto and Foxtel Play subscribers will have access to two new Home and Away specials to be released this summer.

Presto will cease on 31 January 2017.

24 Responses

  1. If Seven is going to continue to work closely with Foxtel, why don’t we get all the old Seven shows on Foxtel. We get “All Saints” and “800 Words” plus they took over “A Place To Call Home” but they should give “A Country Practice” and “Blue Heelers” another spin, they could place “Sons And Daughters” and even old “Home And Away” on Arena and surely there were shows Seven paid for or produced in the 1970’s that I don’t know about because that’s before my time but I love a lot of old TV shows and miss the days when Foxtel was mainly repeats of 60’s/70’s shows that I’d never seen before. They have the channels and not everything is available online despite what everybody says.

  2. I enjoy having Presto. I think it makes a nice, inexpensive complement to my Netflix and Stan memberships. However, PS4 app is buggy as hell. It constantly crashes, logs you out, there are no chapter marking so if it does crash you have to fast forward to where you were up to, no surround sound audio. There is no way to browse their collection – only search, and even then it would find items that weren’t actually in the Presto library. But I thought that their library was excellent – probably the only good thing about it. If Foxtel Play can’t replicate that one good aspect for a comparable price – and it doesn’t look like it will – I’m out.

  3. This new Foxtel Play service needs to be in HD. It just has to be.
    Most people will only subscribe for 1 month (to find the picture quality is terrible) if it’s not in HD.

    1. They don’t even load their “Anytime” catchup episodes on the IQ 2 or 3 in HD… even for those customers who pay $10 per month for HD channels… so why would they give out HD for free on Play?

  4. Presto has been a “dogs Breakfast” right from the beginning, lousy programing, lousy app, lousy everything. Both Stan and Netflix caught Foxtel with it’s pants down from the word go. No idea on how this revamped/rejigged foxtel play is going to go.

  5. Surely this has been on the cards for ages, I get Presto ‘free’ with Foxtel and it has always been ‘until Jan 2017’.
    Not that I’ve ever watched a single show on it.

  6. Hopefully first on Presto tv shows find a new home. Even though Aquarius has been cancelled, I’d still like to watch the first two seasons somewhere. Better finish watching season 2 before January.

    I also found the quality of Presto very poor. When I first subscribed (free with my foxtel subscription, I’d never pay a cent for Presto), I tried watching the x files, and it was awful, the sound was so poor, there was a delay between the actors and the sound. Somehow, Aquarius works quite well, I hope I haven’t jinxed it now.

  7. Gee that didn’t last long.
    Presto was however not great. For a while it was only in SD (terrible mistake), splitting it into two segments (TV & Film) was a terrible mistake as well. It was more expensive than Netflix & Stan and lacked any juicy exclusives.

    You couldn’t get it on any Xbox platform (major fail) and the Telstra TV app was the worst I have ever used on the box (like they didn’t put any effort into it at), the webplayer for the computer felt like a Quicktime video web-player from the early 2000s. I only had it because it came with Telstra TV for three months.

    The service lacked love or interest, the social media content wasn’t funny or enagging like Stan’s, it lacked the advertising and they didn’t take advantage of the major assist being that it was co-run by Foxtel.
    It should have been included as a bonus with all Foxtel subscriptions.

    The whole thing was…

    1. I think you’ve covered all the reasons for its failure here! So glad a ditched Presto for Stan a few months ago now. One thing Stan could take from Presto is having a weekly newsletter highlighting new / notable shows and movies on the platform.

      1. I don’t know about newsletters, but I know that if you follow Stan on Facebook/Twitter, they’ll post when something interesting just got added.
        I get emails from them as well from time to time, so maybe check your account settings you might be able to opt into something.

    2. …a half-arsed attempt to jump on the streaming bandwagon, or “flavour of the month” as Chairman of Free TV Australia Harold Mitchell referred to it back in March 2015.

      Finished your line for you! Agree with everything you said, saved me from writing it.

        1. Plug-in doesn’t actually offer a countdown. 900 characters should be ample to make an initial response though. Alas it was introduced after some people were rambling forever. Where a conversation or debate develops it is ok to return to the topic.

  8. Not to dance on the grave of anyone’s job, but Presto is the deadset worst. I have tried subscribing three times over its life and each time it is as unusable. Crashes, lags, bad search function. Almost impossible to airplay or chromecast or even use on a desktop browser. Plus it was more expensive than the infinitely better Stan and Netflix. I hope that Netflix and Stan can pounce on some of its distribution rights, the ones Foxtel doesn’t take.

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