Yeah, I think you’re probably right, Mark Jennings seems to think handing it all over to Stuff would be the way to go. He’s all over the place, still an interesting read though.
The American owners of TV3 need to be good guys and sell the network to Stuff’s owner, Sinead Boucher, for a dollar.
The precedent is there. The Australian company Nine Entertainment sold Stuff, which included a bundle of newspapers as well as the digital platform, to Boucher in 2020 for that nominal amount.
The Aussies felt a local owner could do a better job than them and basically handed Stuff over to its chief executive, Boucher.
The same is true of TV3, and Warner Bros Discovery should give it away before it is too late, and they end up shutting the doors and waving goodbye to the remaining staff.
Things already seem grim. This past Sunday night, in the prime time 7.30pm slot, TV3 was showing an Australian show about tow trucks.
Within three years the company could be producing few, if any, local programmes and viewers would be left with only American and Australian reality TV shows.
The ratings will slip away and so too will the already dwindling advertising revenue.
TV3’s owners are also likely to be distracted by the rapid decline in their US legacy television business. Its share price was pummelled recently when it announced a US$9b write-down of its TV channels.
Then there are the challenges of its own merger. Warners and Discovery got together in 2022 but the company’s CEO, David Zaslav, recently told analysts it was like “painting a mural on the side of a building, and all kinds of stuff is falling off. It looks messy, and it is messy. It’s really hard and it’s really challenging.”
Zaslav is also suing the NBA in an attempt to get back the crucial sports rights WBD has just lost.
With all this going on, a tiny television business in far-flung New Zealand won’t get much attention. Closing it down may take a minute or two of discussion at WBD’s board table.
So why should Boucher risk taking over a network that, even with all the major cuts its made, is probably just breaking even?
Well, Boucher took a significant risk earlier in the year when WBD awarded her a contract to produce the 6pm bulletin. This saved WBD at least $20m but the effort required to put out a reasonable quality news programme on a very skinny budget looks like it is starting to weigh on Stuff.
Saturday night’s Three News bulletin had just one proper video news story by a local reporter – the search for a person lost in the Manukau harbour. The rest of the programme was filled with international stories from Britain’s ITV and a big chunk of sport’s news. The only other local video story was a magazine-style piece at the end of the show about a hospital garden.
The ratings are on a downward path and competing with 1News, which completely overpowered Three News at the recent Olympics, is going to be very hard unless something changes.
Three News needs more than one scheduled programme. If a big story breaks overnight viewers have one option – TVNZ breakfast. It is then likely that the household TV will stay on that channel for the 6pm news and perhaps even the 7pm programme.
If Boucher took over TV3 she could truly use the strength of Stuff. Her stable now has some serious TV firepower including Paddy Gower, Lloyd Burr, Tova O’Brien, Sam Hayes, Laura Tupou and others. With the backing of other Stuff journalists these experienced operators could really dent TVNZ at breakfast and 7pm. More so given that TVNZ is losing money and looking to cut $30m in costs.
Boucher would then have real skin in the game and could use Stuff’s huge reach to out market TVNZ. She would have economy of scale with her sales teams and be able to offer advertisers truly integrated campaigns. The advertising industry would support Boucher as it will not want competition in the free-to-air market to disappear.
NZ on Air is also likely to look a lot more favourably on funding programmes screening on a New Zealand-owned channel than it would on an American-owned one.