It’s hard to believe now, but Foxtel was once Australia’s most profitable media company. A decade ago, the cable television broadcaster reached nearly one in every three households in the country. Its annual earnings were close to $1 billion.

But over the past decade, Foxtel has been forced to massively reinvent itself for the Netflix era – walking a tightrope of building a new, low-margin streaming business like Kayo and Binge while keeping as many people as possible paying for its high-margin set-top boxes. It is a balance becoming more and more difficult.