Nine Entertainment reviewing TV programs to cut costs

Nine Network’s The Voice could fall victim to a renewed drive by its parent company to cut programming costs.

The Voice 2020 winner Chris Sebastian. Picture: Supplied.

Nine Network is looking to dump some of its more pricey television shows such as The Voice and squeeze more sports rights savings as part of a cost cutting drive.

With the free-to-air television market struggling in the wake of a double digit drop in advertising revenue during the coronavirus crisis, the broadcaster’s parent Nine Entertainment is focused on slashing costs.

On an investor call after Nine delivered full-year results on Thursday, chief executive Hugh Marks singled out its singing competition show The Voice, featuring singers Delta Goodrem and Boy George, saying it was a “$40m cost in the schedule”.

“As you go forward those shows just, you know, get a little bit more difficult to hold onto,” Mr Marks said Thursday, adding that Nine is working through its TV program slate for the next couple of years.

Mr Marks later told The Australian that Nine long-running renovation competition reality show The Block is “a third of the cost per hour of something like The Voice”, yet delivered an equivalent audience.

“If you look at news and current affairs, it delivers a higher audience than The Voice at significantly reduced cost,” he said.

“In this business model, going forward, we just need to make sure that we continue to invest in things that have the best possible return.

“In some cases there will be shows that have high costs that will become unsustainable.”

Determining when shows had reached that point would be “something that we will continue to assess as we go forward”, he said.

Mr Marks also flagged that Nine was looking for more savings across sport, telling investors that free-to-air TV networks had “carried a significant component of those sports rights costs over the past period”.

In the first three months of the current financial year, Nine said its free-to-air TV revenue was expected to be down around 15 per cent, “reflecting the continued weakness in advertising markets”.

Nine expected its free-to-air TV costs to fall by around 5 per cent over the year, “notwithstanding the cycling of any one-off cost reductions, specifically the NRL”.