Seven to collaborate with competitors

In a rare move in Australian TV, Channel Seven plans on collaborating with its competitors, in order to save costs.

“We are not just talking about sharing news choppers on the weekends. We are looking at far bigger lumps of cost.,” CEO Tim Worner said at yesterday’s Half-Yearly results.

Here are select quotes from that speech:

I’m pleased to announce that Seven maintained its leadership position for a 9th consecutive year in television for both revenue and ratings share. It is also a 19th consecutive half of revenue leadership. We now have a decade of dominance in our sights.

We have had a history-making start to the ratings season and the biggest show on television is bigger than it was last year. There are more people watching My Kitchen Rules this year than in 2015. With the Olympics and a strong content lineup for the rest of the year in our back pocket, I am confident that our team will push very hard toward that decade of dominance.

I may have said to you before that transforming a company and delivering these results is like changing a tyre while travelling 100km/h down the highway. It is no easy feat, but our team has once again delivered, while also undertaking huge change across the organisation. We have a transformation program in place that is reviewing all processes and areas of the business to determine where there are greater efficiencies that can be realised while not compromising the quality of our prolific content output. In addition we are also exploring ways to collaborate more efficiently with competitors in our industry, which is a marked change in terms of how we would have operated a few years ago. We are not just talking about sharing news choppers on the weekends. We are looking at far bigger lumps of cost. More on that later.

A major milestone in the transformation of our business was delivered in the half with the highly successful launch of live streaming as planned and well ahead of anyone else. With Racing dot com starting yesterday, all the channels of Seven are now live 24/7 anywhere, anytime and on any screen right across Australia. Importantly this is also now independently measured and incrementally monetised. This is a very exciting opportunity for our company as we have now served almost 10m live streams in the first 15 weeks alone. More on this later as well.

We continue to invest in producing our own content locally and internationally which we called out as a priority the last time we were in front of you. This focus is paying off with our 3rd party production and program sales doubling this half, off the back of commissions from Foxtel, The Travel Channel, various UK broadcasters and continued demand for our formats and finished programs overseas.

As we’ve said, this is our ninth consecutive year of being number one in ratings and revenue. Seven recorded a 39% revenue share for 2015 and a 38.5% share for the second half of the calendar year. This is a solid result delivered even up against the Ashes cricket, Rugby World Cup and the Australian based Cricket World Cup. These events will not be repeated in the coming year. What we will have is the Rio 2016 Olympics on Seven. We’ll cover the great response we have had to this a bit later. What we have already had is a record-breaking start to this ratings season. We are above a 40 share of the crucial 25-54 demographic. No network has ever been there before.

A large part of this success lies with our Australian programs, a lot of them produced by Seven. Clear standouts included the performance of our new 5pm program, The Chase Australia, and the resurgence of Seven News following the re-launch of our schedule in early September.

Australian drama remains a core pillar of our programming strategy and an area of leadership for Seven with another year of top performing pieces including: Peter Allen, 800 Words and Home & Away.

We have been greatly encouraged by recent positive indications from Government about licence fees. We believe the Government understands that local broadcasters are seriously disadvantaged relative to over the top global competitors and the fees paid by Australian broadcasters are well in excess of those paid in any comparable jurisdiction. However, I cannot stress enough that action on this issue is now well overdue and is urgently required.

Transforming and adapting to become a more lean and agile operation is a recurring theme across all of our businesses. As I mentioned earlier, as well as the ongoing review of processes we are in active discussions with our free to air peers around how we can work better together. This includes aggregating digital technology under Freeview. We are also exploring operational efficiencies in parts of our organisations that aren’t deemed areas of competitive advantage. Add to that collectively and more effectively promoting the power of television.

We are excited to announce that we will be launching a new FTA channel on 28th February. 7Flix, which will also be available live anywhere, anytime and on any screen will focus on premium movies , comedy and drama content. The channel is designed to complement our current demographic performance.