Nine, Fairfax confirm StreamCo partnership
Nine & Fairfax confirm a new joint venture streaming service, to launch in the 2015 financial year.
- Published by David Knox
- on
Nine Entertainment Co. and Fairfax Media have confirmed they will partner for a joint venture online streaming service, StreamCo.
Both companies will pour $50m each into the Australian Subscription Video-On-Demand (SVOD) service over ‘a multi-year period’ for the service offering TV series, movies, kids and family programming, and documentaries from Australian and international studios and the Nine Network. A monthly subscription fee has not been confirmed, but has been rumoured to be $10 a month. There will be no minimum term commitment.
Expected to launch during the 2015 financial year, StreamCo will offer unlimited, on-demand viewing through television screens, tablets, PCs and mobile devices.
The service comes at a time when IPTV has been ramping up with other players including Foxtel’s Presto, Quickflix and speculation of Netflix launching in Australia.
StreamCo will be operated independently of Nine’s and Fairfax’s existing media businesses, headed by CEO Mike Sneesby, previously Head of Corporate Strategy and Development at ninemsn.
David Gyngell, CEO of NEC, said: “I am excited about working with one of Australia’s iconic media companies on this ground breaking opportunity. The combination of our two businesses will provide the joint venture with unprecedented distribution and awareness. I look forward to building one of Australia’s greatest new media businesses.”
Greg Hywood, CEO of Fairfax Media, said: “We’re delighted to join Nine in developing a compelling subscription video service. SVOD is a proven business model overseas, and we look forward to offering this service to our subscribers, and indeed all Australians. Fairfax will continue to seek innovative ways to engage and expand our audiences, and this is an opportunity to create value through participating in the next wave of media evolution. Nine is a fantastic partner and we look forward to working with them on StreamCo.”
Mike Sneesby, CEO of StreamCo, said: “Having two of Australia’s pre-eminent media companies as StreamCo’s shareholders strengthens the base of our experience, whilst providing an amazing marketing and promotional platform for our new service. I look forward to revealing more details about our offering in the near future.”
4 Responses
@Nick – nice! However, if you install a flash-blocker in your browser, you’ll not have that problem (well, until they switch to HTML5 but by then there’ll prob be a decent blocker for that too).
Can Fairfax confirm that all the videos won’t automatically start playing 5 seconds after visiting the site?
@Pertinax – I think you’re probably right. : (
So we are going to end up with ten streaming services all serving up US content and you can guarantee that the one you subscribe too isn’t the one that owns the right to what you want to watch tonight.