Business of Media
Amazon’s spend on TV and film in UK passes £1bn as Netflix cuts back
Amazon has invested more than £1bn on TV, movie and live sport content in the UK in recent years and plans to increase spending to make it a must-have streaming service for cash-strapped households, reports The Guardian’s Mark Sweney.
It is the first time that Amazon has revealed the level of investment in Prime Video in the UK, spanning the period since 2018, as competition for viewers intensifies amid a mounting cost of living crisis.
While Amazon’s annual UK budget lags that of the $1bn (£810m) spent by Netflix on hits from Bridgerton to Sex Education, it continues to rapidly grow – with big releases in the pipeline such as the Lord of the Rings series – while its rival is in the process of cutting budgets and staff after reporting its first fall in subscribers in a decade.
Fox happy to stay out of the streaming wars “bloodbath,” says CEO Lachlan Murdoch
Fox is more than happy to be outside of the streaming wars and focused instead on its advertising-based video-on-demand platform and its live offerings, reports The Hollywood Reporter’s Caitlin Huston.
“We’ve been very happily on the sidelines watching this sort of bloodbath, which is going on in the SVOD market,” Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said Wednesday. “And what that’s meant is we haven’t had to spend billions of dollars propping up an SVOD service, but we also haven’t felt the need to artificially put sports into an SVOD service to keep subscription levels up.”
Speaking at the MoffettNathanson’s Media and Communications summit, Murdoch touted the company’s advertising-based platform, Tubi, as well as the continued growth of Fox News and Fox Nation. Fox was able to put itself in this position by selling off large portions of 21st Century Fox to Disney in 2019. And now, Murdoch said, Fox is focused on “live news, live sports” and entertainment, but “in a focused way.”
Agencies
VMLY&R appoints Janelle Shinners as head of client engagement
Global brand and customer experience agency, VMLY&R has announced the appointment of Janelle Shinners as head of client engagement in Brisbane, effective from the beginning of June 2022.
Shinners will work alongside VMLY&R’s Queensland leadership team to enhance VMLY&R’s client engagement function and integrated offering. She will work across VMLY&R’s clients including The Lottery Corporation, TerryWhite Chemmart, Bond University, Goodlife Health Clubs, Visit Brisbane, The Coffee Club, and RSL Queensland among others.
Having built her career across creative, media and client roles, Shinners brings extensive category experience, data and consumer insight and people leadership skills to the role.
M&C Saatchi Sport and Entertainment announces four key appointments
M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment has announced four key appointments to its team to support the agency’s rapid growth.
The PR and sponsorship agency has invested heavily in talent and recruited specialists with experience in the UK and US as well as those who have worked with local rights holders, to strengthen its offering for clients including CommBank, Woolworths, Origin Energy and WHOOP.
Oliver Braley joins the team as senior account director, partnerships from Fuse London. He has worked on brands such as Vodafone and HSBC and managing partnerships with premium rights holders such as Tour de France, British & Irish Lions and London Marathon Events.
Supporting Braley, are an additional three hires in the Partnerships team, including:
Jack Buckland, senior account manager, who has international experience on both agency and rightsholder side, joining from Octagon where he worked with brands including Mastercard, Cisco Webex and QBE Insurance to manage sponsorships including the Australian Open and Rugby World Cup.
Allegra Sotudeh who has delivered campaigns for Nike, Sony and Uber in the US and for Google, Bacardi and William Grants in Australia. With an event production background, she has also worked on producing large scale events such as Coachella and Variety Summits.
Kira Mobberley who comes from the National Sporting Organisation (NSO) Surfing Australia where she worked with clients such as Hyundai, Nikon and Zambrero to maximise their partnerships, as well as the Australian leg of the World Surf League’s Championship Tour.
News Brands
Top 50 news sites in the world: Major websites see declining traffic in April
Most major news sites saw a year-on-year and month-on-month fall in their traffic in April, as news interest in the Ukraine war is likely to be waning, reports Press Gazette’s Aisha Majid.
Six of the ten biggest English language news sites in the world by number of visits saw fewer visits in April, compared to the same month last year, according to data from digital intelligence platform Similarweb. Of this group, Yahoo Finance saw the biggest year-on-year fall in traffic (2404.m visits, down 14%). It was followed by the BBC.co.uk and BBC.com sites (1.1bn visits, down 11%) and Fox News (252.5m visits, down 6%).
Bucking the trend among this list of ten leading sites was the New York Times which had 546.5m visits in March (up 51%) and Mail Online (354.5m visits, up 11%). The New York Times’ acquisition of Wordle in January will likely have been among the factors that have helped increase its popularity.
Television
New Sky News documentary to air into the murder of Mackay woman Shandee Blackburn
The Australian’s true-crime podcast on the fatal stabbing of Shandee Blackburn has led to the creation of a new one-hour television documentary to air next month, reports News Corp’s Sophie Elsworth.
Based on the podcast series, Shandee’s Story, created by The Australian’s award-winning investigative journalist Hedley Thomas, the documentary, Shandee’s Story: The Search for Justice, will reveal new information into the unsolved murder.
Thomas spent months working on the documentary, conducting extensive interviews as he retraced Shandee’s final steps before her brutal death in 2013.
Why this season is make or break for The Bachelor
“What do we do with The Bachelor?”
That was the big question posed by Beverley McGarvey, the local executive vice president and chief content officer at Paramount (which owns Network 10, home of the reality-TV dating franchise), at the end of last year, reports SMH’s Meg Watson.
In an interview with Mediaweek, she identified both The Bachelor and The Bachelorette as key areas for improvement and spoke about the need for “pivots” that might bring the franchise “back to its glory days”.
It’s rare for a big exec to be so frank about a network’s failures. But the subject has become hard to avoid. In 2021, both shows posted some of the lowest ratings in the franchise’s nine-year history.
The upcoming season is clearly make or break for The Bachelor, and fans are now starting to get a taste of what’s to come. But nearly 10 years since the show first premiered in Australia, is it actually possible to pivot back to the “glory days”? And what does that mean when you’re talking about what has traditionally been one of the least diverse shows on Australian TV?
Triple treat in store for Bachelor viewers
Three bachelors will be a triple treat vying for the hearts of viewers as Channel 10 supersizes its flagging dating series in an attempt to breathe new life into the franchise, reports News Corp’s Fiona Byrne.
And in a move to sex up the show is it believed ‘fantasy suites’ will be introduced.
Melbourne basketballer Felix Von Hofe, Sydney lifestyle trainer Thomas Malucelli and Jed McIntosh, a drummer who hails from Drouin West in Gippsland, are the team of single blokes looking for their one true love from a field of female suitors on the Gold Coast-based show this season.
Multiple bachelors is not the only change the show has undergone this year.
Sports Media
Ray Warren: The elephant in the Channel Nine commentary box
It’s the elephant in the Channel Nine commentary box, reports SMH’s Andrew Webster.
Where is our beloved Ray Warren and is he going to call the State of Origin opener on June 8? Someone? Something?
The short answer is nobody knows, including the man himself.
He discussed the situation with Nine’s sports director Brent Williams during the week and neither emerged with a clearer idea of whether Warren has hung up his battered binoculars.
If Warren does call the match, it will be his 100th Origin. If he doesn’t, he will be pulling down the shutters on one of the great broadcasting careers.