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Seven boss: Fast-tracking strategy can be “jumping at shadows.”

Seven's Tim Worner talks down the impact of illegal piracy on TV, in the wake of TEN's low ratings for Homeland.

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Seven boss Tim Worner has talked down the impact of illegal piracy on broadcast television, in the wake of much discussion about TEN’s low ratings for Homeland.

This is despite Seven having previously been a part of AFACT’s failed bid to make internet service providers accountable for illegal activities of their subscribers.

It’s fair to say that Seven is less impacted by downloading than TEN and Foxtel, because its audience skews older.

Seven is holding off the second season of Revenge and the third season of Downton Abbey until 2013.

It also has Last Resort and Mrs Biggs amongst its upcoming international titles.

“I’m confident that those shows won’t be greatly affected by the fact they have been on somewhere else first,” Worner told Daily Telegraph.

“I know there are other people in the industry who feel differently (about the ratings effects of illegal downloading) and they are making their programming decisions based on that feeling, but I think it’s jumping at shadows.

“By saying that I am not saying we have our head in the sand and we don’t think that there are challenges we are facing, but I don’t think it’s going to kill television.”

Seven has strategically chosen to fast-track a selection of shows that are established such as Grey’s Anatomy and The Amazing Race but holding new titles to next year. Nine has adopted a similar approach. But TEN is seeking to lift its performance with fast-tracked shows.

But viewing habits are constantly changing, and some shows are susceptible to both downloading as well as timeshifting on PVRs.

What is rarely reported in media is the boost from Consolidated data. Last week The Good Wife pulled 490,000 viewers but increased by 123,000 viewers on Consolidated numbers to reach to 613,000 viewers, -another 25%. Yesterday TEN CEO James Warburton noted with frustration that the US industry focusses a lot more on Timeshifted data than Australia.

Meanwhile, Worner also told SKY News Business yesterday that he hoped TEN would improve, if only to help take eyeballs away from Nine. No doubt, Nine is feeling mutual about that one.

37 Responses

  1. I would say the best way to sum up the drop from S1 is that the “niche” audience and the diehard fans tuned in. The mainstream who have left Ch10 in droves and are out of the habit of watching 10 have not. I predict the audience will grow with time and with word of mouth. Ch10 have to be patient with this and its other shows.

  2. @steveany 2.0 – your comment appeared after I posted (and prob warrants a separate post anyway).

    I agree with what you say about the content of Homeland (and the failed vest-bomb was a little “deus ex machina”) but I accept that at least some of these tropes are part of creating enough dramatic tension to make the story interesting enough to watch week in, week out (unlike real-life).

    I’m still enjoying it and hope that the writers don’t start just “making shit up as they go along”. If they do, let’s pray that it’s more like Lost than Heroes.

    And don’t get me started on Carrie’s field craft, or lack thereof – we’ll be here quite some time. There’s a reason why one group of agents gather intel in the field and a completely different bunch sit in a windowless room analysing it.

  4. Have to agree with Worner that downloading is not a big issue for most programs at the moment, and even less for Seven (and ABC) with its older-skewing audience. However, this is certainly changing and will become much more important as the last of baby-boomers move into the less advertiser-friendly 55+ age group, and the tech-weened teens and twenties become the big spenders.

    Despite what some people are saying here and elsewhere on the net (we and our friends are a biased sample), fast-tracking is not the panacea for a TV network’s low ratings. Again, that will likely change as the technologically competent become the dominant consumers, and there are some current shows that are possibly being noticeably affected by this right now; ie those that appeal more to younger tech-savvy people.

    Still, the networks will need to address this sooner rather than later. Things prob won’t change that drastically for the next three years and possibly five. After that, who knows?

    Despite some of us having had fast (3Mbps+) internet for years, for the majority, getting the NBN is going to be like connecting to the electricity grid – it’s going to open up a world of possibilities, most of which haven’t been invented yet. Hopefully it won’t be as depicted in the second ep of Black Mirror.

  5. I normally don’t weigh in on why people watch or don’t watch shows because it’s purely a matter of taste, but I just have to comment on Homeland.
    A lot of people I respect on this site love this show so I expect to be howled down, but can I submit that some of the folks who should be watching (ie me) don’t watch any more because it’s no good.
    Loved the first half of S1, but then for me the show bogged down in the pure soap of terrorists-banging-FBI agents, cliches of bad bosses and no-one-believing-the-good-guy (girl in this case), melodramatic adultery and other manipulative artifices (a suicide vest that fails to go off – really?) that make the show more like Melrose Place than a serious drama. Plus, for we older & wiser types, the procedures are a ‘bit off’ – ref @S.Squirrel’s comment on the agent’s poor anti-shadowing technique.
    Don’t get me wrong, the acting is superb (love the three main actors) but you can just feel that like Lost or The X FIles, the writers are just making up this shit as they go along to see what resonates with the audience. So I don’t watch any more, fast-tracking or not.
    Okay, now you can hammer me…..

  6. @ shazz & Kirk, Your thoughts on Homeland are precisely what I attempted to convey many moons ago. The acting may be first class and the show may win bucketloads of awards in the States and even though the storyline and content may be strong, it is designed to appeal to Americans, not Australians.
    Whilst there are still many items of interest we can agree upon with the Yanks, politics however, is most certainly not one of them.

    1. I don’t subscribe to that theory at all. A good story is a good story (and S1 proved this, not to mention countless other series). Homeland will be up with PVR numbers on Monday, albeit not in the range of S1.

  7. Im 28 years old, and Free- to- Air lost me as a regular viewer of its content well over ten years ago. I have pretty much bought locally or imported every TV series I want to watch on DVD. Poor scheduling of niche shows i am interested in was always the biggest cause, having to wait years for series that I enjoy or late night slots that were always on the move.. I prefer to enjoy a full series run when I get the DVD’s, ad free and when I want to watch it. It’s rather freeing to be so ineffected by how poorly most shows do in this country.

  8. I suspect he is overstating the degree of technical ignorance among the elderly. My step father
    (70+) asked me last night how to download TV programs and I doin’t think it was academic interest only (insert standard disclaimer about not condoning illegal downloading). I think this is just more of the usual denial and hoping that by ignoring the issue it will go away to the good old days when TV stations decided if, when and how much us plebs watch.

  9. There are inherent problems with fast tracking, ie. gaps in programming based on US timelines (eg American football, election, American holidays) and that while Australia pauses its regular programming in our summer, US do so in their summer. So it isn’t perfect. But all the more reason why if you’re going to do it, you need to do it properly. If you do it half hearted, you’ve still got these inherent problems, but without the full rewards.

    The programmers don’t give us any credit for understanding why a program might pause for a couple of weeks. Explain it in your advertising and guess what – we might just understand. Need a new model – respect the audience, assume we’re not all morons, explain programming gaps in advertising and on you’re channel’s website. It doesn’t need to be this hard!

  10. I’m not so fixated by television that I feel the need to download a show the second it comes off the assembly line. I’m quite content to wait until it comes to FTA. By frenetically downloading all the time, what’s to look forward to? More trolling the world looking for the latest content – often unfunny American comedies.

    Sorry, but you guys need to get a life – away from your screens.

  11. @Kirk

    Completely agree, there are far too many American series like Homeland that have no appeal to Australians in general due to its extremely American viewpoint and content.

    It’s really annoying having so many shows on tv that have an alien culture constantly portrayed, with attitudes that can be considered wrong by Australian standards.

  12. Viewers are watching more TV. And they are delivering good overnights for News and Current Affairs, singing and cooking contests, sport and popular Australian dramas.

    US dramas are rating less. That is mostly because of timeshifting and competition from STV, the internet and singing contests. This is driven by technology and is happening more in the US where delays are not an issue.

    Illegal downloading is another problem for Australian networks. But it is not that large and it is far from clear than fast-tracking will do anything to reduce it. In fact there is no evidence that fast-tracking has yielded any commercial benefits and many cases where it has cost and accelerated the decline in overnights for US dramas.

    We shall see if Seven is right or not when the ratings for Revenge and Downton Abbey become available next year. But with Dowton Abbey will difficult situation because they are probably going to move it from June to February,where it is likely to rate less due to the small size of the audience.

  13. TEN did completely the right thing in fast-tracking Homeland, the problem was that no one was watching TEN before to see the commercials of when these shows air.

    Seven holds off with there shows so they can advertise them 6 months before they air, engraving them into our brains like the true propaganda machine that they are…

  14. @Darwinite
    In Homeland they set up the season’s story about Abu Nazir is planning a terrorist attack and one of Carrie’s old assets is offering information. A semi-stable Carrie has been forced back into the field. She had a narrow escape from foreign agents in Beruit.

    Broady’s politcal career is going gang busters but Nazir is pressuring him to work for him as a spy.
    Broady wife is upset now that she has found out he has converted to Islam and is lying about that in his run for VP.

    There was only one car chase and no sex which I guess was your problem.

  15. Homeland got low ratings because it features topics and story lines of no interest to the majority of Australians (not including myself mind you). You can tell by the ratings performances that big Australian shows or broader comedy are hitting the spot (although not always – looking at you, new episodes of modern family).

  16. Networks are simply training viewers not to trust them due to delays, inconsistent schedules and most importantly a lack of fast tracking. So what do viewers do? They download. The networks are fostering a generation of downloaders. Eventually the downloaders will be a huge component of the audience as older generations die out. The networks will scramble to get them back but it’ll be too late as they are used to watching a show ad-free in their own time. Newspapers took too long to adapt to the digital age and now look at them. Television isn’t far behind…

  18. Completely agree, someone in tv land is using their brain.

    I think ten are fully aware of the consequences of fast tracking, they have pretty much just killed their entire fleet of US imports because of it. It was only ever a desperate way to fill slots in their content crisis.

  19. Homeland isn’t a stellar show that is another factor on why it got poor ratings not just because the fans would have already pre-downloaded it. The last episode went for an hour and basically nothing happened.

    I believe people download shows because the TV networks in Australia either refuse to show or delay showing some great series.

    I see so much crap on today and series like Pysch and Monk aren’t even given a looksee. Lucky cable came to the rescue with those.

  20. I don’t believe your below comment rings true. Seven is well ahead of TEN this year in any demo and really close to Nine in all.

    ‘It’s fair to say that Seven is less impacted by downloading than TEN and Foxtel, because its audience skews older.’

  21. I don’t think there is any one cause for the low rating of some returning shows. I doubt half a million people are illegally downloading Homeland each week but one problem is it is on almost 2 weeks after the US.

    I read an interview for an unrelated show and they commented on something in one of the eps that has not aired here. So even if you’re not looking for spoilers they can be pretty hard to avoid in this online world.

    TEN should have held off Vegas for one week, doubled up Homeland to lesson the gap or better still have it on Mondays instead of Can of Worms, just hours after the US could have been the promotion. I guess now we’ll never know if that would have made the difference?

  22. Well I do not download shows at all, but I am purchasing “Downton Abbey” season 3 from the UK, Watching from early November and I know quite a few people will do the same thing. When Seven finally show it I will probably do a re run, missing all the commercials.
    So I think that holding off shows is a bad idea !

  23. Good luck with that thinking Worner. So if it’s not gonna affect you, is he saying it’s ok? Seven know they are that far ahead and have that many viewers that they can afford to treat them like crap. Ten burnt all it’s viewers and now has a long way to get them back. Fast tracking was a start. But when i tune in at 9.30 for a show that’s fast tracked and it starts at 9.40 well that’s one step forward and three steps back. Ten had me with Hawaii Five 0 and then lost me right away.

    What ABC did with Dr Who was brilliant. Offered immediacy for those that wanted it, everyone else waited 6 days for it on tv. No one in Australia should have pirated it.

    I don’t understand why networks can’t fast track US shows from September to April, then air Aussie content. I know there’s some flaws to that strategy but it’d be a lot better for viewers.

  24. I feel like the younger a show skews, the more internet buzz / twitter / blog news a show creates – the more it needs to be fast tracked.

    And I think they need to follow the cable fast track model – air within a few days minimum (if possible)

    For example, Revenge, Survivor, Once, Modern Family etc need to be fast tracked.

    Good Wife, CSI, Law & Order not so much.

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