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There is a long list of challenges and headwinds facing Foxtel. Come next year, it is all but certain it will lose valuable HBO content as its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, launches its own Max streaming platform down under. Succession, The Last of Us, Game of Thrones â gone.
Growth has plateaued for both Kayo and Binge, and high-margin residential subscriptions are still dropping at more than 10 per cent each year.
The trouble is, the cost of those sports rights is increasing rapidly â Foxtel and Seven West Media will pay $4.5 billion for the AFL, and $1.5 billion for the Cricket from 2025. There will be less and less money to pay for them every year without significant price hikes at Kayo.
In the face of this, Foxtel has spent $77 million launching Hubbl, a confusing answer to a question no-one was really asking. The numbers circulating of how many Hubbl units have been selling at major retailers are, to put it mildly, rough.
It really doesnât seem like a a profitable business. The only thing going for it is its sports deals, but they donât seem profitable in the long run.
We are definitely seeing the end of Foxtel.
Surely the satellite business is being wound down already, what could and should be profitable is the sports streaming.
What about the rural subscribers? They will still need the satellite service as internet speeds can be slow.
Sporting codes will eventually do their own streaming services. Weâll have to pay for endless streaming services to watch what we want.
People wlll rue the day calling Foxtel a rip off.
The trouble is, the cost of those sports rights is increasing rapidly â Foxtel and Seven West Media will pay $4.5 billion for the AFL, and $1.5 billion for the Cricket from 2025. There will be less and less money to pay for them every year without significant price hikes at Kayo.
Not to mention that the NRL and Supercars are approaching locking in new deals in the next 12 months or so too. Retaining both sports is unlikely to be cheap.
In the face of this, Foxtel has spent $77 million launching Hubbl, a confusing answer to a question no-one was really asking. The numbers circulating of how many Hubbl units have been selling at major retailers are, to put it mildly, rough.
Hubbl is interesting - theyâre devices that are in fairly crowded markets where the only real standout selling point is convergence. I canât talk about the Glass product(s), but the box is decent, it has a few issues that will be fixable in software but Iâm not convinced it is better than the Apple TV (or the Nvidia Shield) when the latter offers a much greater app offering by having âopenâ app stores.
It still has a place, although itâs diminishing. In a retail consumer space, it possibly has a limited life left, but I can see it being used for commercial customers for the long term
How Foxtel handles the legacy elements of their business is going to be important because theyâre going to become expensive to operate as the subscriber base dwindles on the legacy platform
Iâm not convinced our sports are big enough to sustain their own services - they work in the States where there are a lot of games regularly (and youâre effectively curating a service from a number of content providers)
They should head down to the local Nationals MP office and ask them why they donât have NBN to the home.
Woops.
Meh, everyone is allowed an opinion and have their own experiences. I agree with him, I think the brand is toxic⌠Just the experience of trying to cancel Foxtel 12 months ago was one of the most deceiving experiences I have ever dealt with.
Two possibilities:
- NBNâs Sky Muster Plus plans are unlimited plans with speeds up to 100 Mbit/s. The Tâs & Câs indicated that traffic can be shaped so not sure how good it is for reliable streaming.
- Starlink
FTTP all ended after the 2013 election.
A decade later, now FTTN is being replaced with FTTC (Fibre to the curb) with NBN offering some customers FTTP if they want it for a cheaper price.
FTTN isnât being replaced with FTTC, FTTC is as dead a technology as FTTN, theyâre both being replaced with FTTP.
Original Labor plan was for 93% fibre. Always needed Satellite services for rural locations
The fibre is being rolled out from FTTN boxes, down each street, but it will only be activated to the home (i.e extended from the street to the home) when there is demand. Which is different from Laborâs original plan for every house and business to have a fibre connection to the premises.
So, youâre half right, itâs FTTP based on demand.
Those who donât want or need FTTP will be stuck with FTTN and FTTC.
In the terms of things a few rural subscribers isnât sustainable to keep a satellite service going. Tough luck.
Yes, but are they popular because theyâre good? Or because theyâre all thatâs available?
(Yes I know strictly speaking there are other services, donât @ me 
but if you want sport you gotta have Foxtel)
Anyway Foxtel wonât exist in 10 yearsâ time. Thatâs my hot take on all this. The satellite service will be gone and the streaming arms merged with some other streaming service.
Iâd say five years at this rate given the amount of channels that seem to be going every year.
Of particular interest is Patrick Delanyâs explanation on the departure of several BBC channels.
Foxtel has lost some BBC content recently. Not totally though, as Delany explained: âWeâve maintained UKTV. The BBC Wild Channel didnât have a huge following. Those documentaries are in most places.
âBBC News is not watched by a lot of people. The interesting thing in my 30-year PPV career is it was one of the first channels in the 20-channel pack of Foxtel, along with CNN. But these days, Sky News is just a giant compared to the others.
âBBC First started out to be a place where you would get the BBC productions first. BBC First was not the channel that was envisaged 10 years ago. It ended up being a channel where, frankly, I can stand in the market and buy the same dramas because the worldâs changed so much. BBC makes things but does it in concert with other streamers and other people. They donât always have the rights to pass through.
âWith the majority of our customers now digital, we can see exactly what theyâre watching, what their habits are. We know the market pretty well. Sometimes youâve got to make brave decisions and say, well, that channelâs not necessarily great value for us, which means itâs not great value for subscribers.â
This shouldnât be the point. When it comes to things like music, news and childrenâs channels - the benefit of Foxtel should be to have multiple options that users can access. These are the things that they should be boosting up more as they lose other content.
I commonly flick between the various news and music channels. Itâs good they are bringing in some more music options (even if they are already available in other places) but the news side is looking a bit bare now without BBC News which is one of my go to channels when thereâs a big international story happening.
It just makes it hard when you have to go to different places for these things (even if BBC News is now available on their website) but I guess that is the future with more things moving across multiple streaming providers. The more things that are removed from Foxtel, even if the average subscriber only watches them here or there, means that the benefit of having Foxtel is really starting to fade.
news is definitely one of those things that maybe not a ton of people watch, but for news junkies itâs a massive selling point. If anything iâs like to see more news channels to provide differing perspectives. Id like to see more asian channels for example.