Streaming wins hearts and minds
Viewers wanted food at the start of the decade and after a little medieval fantasy fare they are still hungry for reality.
Talk about taking out the trash. A few days before Y2K, the Howard government announced a digital television policy that effectively banned “datacasters” from the airwaves. “If it ends up on a PC,” communications minister Richard Alston said, “we don’t care. If it ends up on a TV screen, then it’s governed by this regime.” The policy didn’t just preserve the free-to-air monopoly, it extended it into new territories: high-definition broadcasting and digital multichannelling.
Without competition, the networks sat on their hands for a decade, blithely ignoring the strict HD broadcasting quotas that were an explicit quid pro quo. News Limited’s then executive chairman Lachlan Murdoch told a Fairfax reporter the policy protected the “free-to-air TV cartel”. With the benefit of 20 years’ hindsight, Kerry Packer and Kerry Stokes look like dinosaurs fighting over a juicy carcass, unaware of the asteroid hurtling towards them.
Even after the global financial crisis — when every ratings point was worth a cool $30m — the trough was still snout-worthy. With belts tightened, folks were staying home spending extra time in front of the new flat screen — thank you, Kevin Rudd stimulus package! But free-to-air’s Indian summer was about to crash. By the middle of the decade, audiences would be OD-ing on video on demand. The FTA networks, which had survived the VCR in the 1980s and pay-TV in the 90s, would have to band together like the seven kingdoms under the Freeview banner. Winter had come.
2010
July 25. An audience of 3.96 million tunes in to watch Adam Liaw crowned MasterChef. That’s three million more viewers than this year’s finale. There’s format fatigue, of course, and plenty of new competition. Apart from rival free-to-air shows, such as My Kitchen Rules, two digital channels are now devoted entirely to food.
August 9. After one year on the air, GO! had grossed the Nine Network $100m for an outlay of just $10m. GO! wasn’t the first of the digital channels — Ten’s HD sports channel took line honours — but it was the smartest. It siphoned off marginal shows (V, Fringe, The Wire) and packaged them with shows the main channel wouldn’t touch, like LGBT supernatural soap opera Dante’s Cove. Instead of fracturing audiences, as Packer had grumpily predicted in the 90s, the extra channels allowed the networks to target specific demographics. The main channel lost viewers, but the group was up almost 10 per cent.
2012
April 15. Girls premieres on HBO. Love her or hate her, Lena Dunham has changed TV. She has challenged and changed our expectations. Girls is the pivot point between Sex and the City and the latest wave of elite TV sex sitcoms, culminating in shows such as Broad City and Fleabag.
2013
June 2. Game of Thrones, season three, episode nine: The Rains of Castamere. It was impossible to avoid the tidal wave of shock and consternation on social media after the Red Wedding. Cultural moments such as these are rare. What can match it in this shattered age? A new Harry Potter book? A new iPhone? A new Yoda? Perhaps they were never all that common on our TVs. Who killed Laura Palmer? (Or, indeed, C. Montgomery Burns?) But, then, unexpectedly, came the fast-track daddy of them all …
November 24. The Day of the Doctor. For the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, a special episode was simulcast to more than 75 countries: from Cabo Verde to Myanmar, Russia to Uruguay.
2015
January 26. The launch of Stan. Five years on, 16 per cent of Australians aged 14 and older have access to it.
March 15. The final episode of HBO’s true-crime miniseries The Jinx screened. In it, accused murderer Robert Durst is heard muttering to himself in a bathroom, microphone still attached, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, o’ course.”
March 24. Netflix finally arrives in Australia, eliminating the “but I had to pirate it” defence. According to Roy Morgan stats, three months after its launch in Australia, Netflix had a million viewers. After a year, four million. After two years, seven million. As of this month, on the back of blockbuster series such as The Crown, 57 per cent of Australians aged 14 and older have access to it. Its nearest rival, Foxtel, reaches 25 per cent, not counting Foxtel’s considerable reach in pubs and clubs. A downside of Netflix dominance is that its shows sometimes clobber worthier rivals. The Jinx, for example, hardly rated a mention alongside the vastly inferior Making a Murderer. The Jinx won a Peabody but Making a Murderer won a swag of Primetime Emmy Awards. Likewise, when rival documentaries on the Fyre festival appeared in January, the excellent Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud (by Julia Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst) was eclipsed by the duller Netflix offering Fyre. Free-to-air shows also can steal oxygen from shows with limited distribution. Here, I’m thinking of Caro Meldrum-Hanna’s Exposed: The Case of Keli Lane (ABC), which was cheap and nasty compared with Debi Marshall’s Frozen Lies on Foxtel or US series Murder in the Bayou.
2016
August. This is the first month in which households with pay-TV or a subscription streaming service outnumbered the ones without. As of December 2019, the split is now 69 per cent with, 31 per cent without.
2019
June 2. Premiere episode of the New York Times series The Weekly. (FX and Hulu in the US, SBS On Demand locally). The Weekly is a powerful and exciting model for the future of broadsheet journalism in a multi-platform environment. Using newsroom resources, the Times produces mini documentaries, typically a half-hour in length. They’re a cross between the investigative podcasts that this newspaper has produced and the special reports that Four Corners (and, on rare occasions, 60 Minutes) has broadcast.
November 1. Disney Plus and Apple TV+ launch in Australia. Disney Plus launched in Australia and New Zealand two weeks before the US, Canada and The Netherlands, presumably to go head-to-head with Apple TV+. If any companies have the resources to take on the might of Netflix, it is these two. Apple, in particular, has come out swinging, premiering a spread of original material, including Morning Wars, a delicious amalgam of Broadcast News and Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill.
November 4. The only episode of Q&A I regret missing. The so-called Broadside episode, hosted by Fran Kelly, has been removed from the ABC’s catch-up platforms. “The ABC acknowledges that this episode offended some viewers who interpreted some panellist statements as advocating violence.” Towards men.
Leaving aside the finales of reality TV shows — The Block pulled 1.9 million viewers in the mainland capital cities earlier this month, The Masked Singer 1.4 million and The Bachelorette 992,000 — are there any non-sporting shows that have such a galvanising effect as Q&A? Does anything rival it for participation since Kyle Sandilands hosted Big Brother in the days before Twitter? Honestly, I can’t stand the show. Forget waterboarding, just play me the title music of Q&A in Gitmo and I’ll cave immediately.
2020
January 9. Billed as a Stan Original, Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang is in cinemas for a limited release before streaming on January 26. Apart from the tedious procession of too-expensive-to-be-risky franchise blockbusters, narrative cinema is down for the count. Streaming services are dancing about on cinema’s shallow grave. But what’s the point of a two-week theatrical release? It annoys subscribers and it’s not a long enough season to generate buzz or word of mouth. If it’s a three-hour Scorsese production, that’s an Irishman of a different colour.
Postscript
Is Gogglebox the show of the decade? Apart from providing a digest of the shows of the previous week, Gogglebox is a brilliant placebo for those of us who miss watching TV with family and friends, and is a nostalgic reminder of what TV viewing was like in the 60s and 70s.
It’s also a delightful glimpse into the lives of others, a reminder of how good-hearted we are, deep down, as a nation.
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