Wonder if Nine would be interested in TV3, noting that it doesn’t appear to be for sale, their MBA brain owners are too thick to see the value and halo effect in news. Trim down the nightly news costs, broadcast Today into NZ again, launch Stan, run a largely carbon copy to Nine programming, pick up the NRL rights next time they come up.
At a certain point Nine is going to reach a point where it can’t grow the businesses much further in Australia, NZ is the obvious next place.
The lease for the Flower Street “campus” runs out in 2025. I imagine this is having some impact on the decision making timelines.
Samantha Hayes (via IG) received some flowers from 1News, its sole state-owned competitor citing:
“To our fellow newsroom friends, it takes a village to make the f***ing news and your village rocks. Thanks for being such great competition. Sending our thoughts, Arohanui.”
Some thoughts from Mark Jennings on how Newshub could be saved.
It sounds very reasonable, bare bones would be better than nothing.
I agree Seven is not in a good position to be thinking about a big investment in a new NZ business - but I do think Nine might be interested, especially if there was an opportunity to establish a holistic business in NZ vs a standalone print/web asset.
I could see a joint venture between Nine and local investors that brings Three and Stuff under a single umbrella, establishes a joint newsroom with a focus on digital output, a medium term streaming strategy, continued supply of content to Three etc. Basically a lot of the same strategy that drove the Fairfax/Nine merger.
It will just be a matter of whether the numbers stack up.
Yep, It’s always the money. Always follow the money.
Money…and appetite for risk.
Wonder if Seven will enter an agreement with TVNZ now that they will be the only TV news broadcaster in the region.
AFAIK Nine and ABC both have agreements with TVNZ (TVNZ has a correspondent based in either Nine’s or ABC’s offices IIRC). Not sure about 10 or SBS.
If he’s willing to move abroad for a few years, I could see Mike McRoberts being an excellent asset to somewhere like Al Jazeera.
What do we reckon are the odds of any news presence on Three after June 30?
5%
The chances of the Seven Network or Nine Entertainment being involved with Three or its news operation are next to nothing. If either of them were interested at all, they would have purchased it when Mediaworks were trying to flog it off a few years ago.
Prime News (as it was known back then) was presented out of Australia for some time. Okay, I see where you’re coming from, but I think news provided by a foreign channel is better than no news at all.
Can sky buy the news operations?
NZME and Sky are the only media companies in New Zealand that are turning a profit at the moment. Interestingly, both of their business models include subscription services and are not solely dependent on advertising revenue.
Unlike MediaWorks, Stuff (mostly supported by ad-revenue), WBD, TVNZ… all are very much dependent on ads!
NZME and Sky could potentially together offer a video news service, that supplies bulletins for Sky and whatever is leftover from TV3, but at a very low cost to produce.
They could but I think they would have a hard time trying to get that past the shareholders. But history also shows they don’t really have an interest in news production, its only thanks to Newshub that they have a half decent bulletin on Sky Open/Prime. They were happy with that pitiful news service that Sky News Australia delivered for years.
I wondered upthread if an option would be for Sky to partner up with another newsroom (NZME or Stuff) and have them produce a bulletin, with the newsroom getting all the ad revenue like Newshub does now. It would cost Sky nothing and could give them a serious reputation/viewership boost.
There is absolutely no indication WBDiscovery are willing to sell though - they seem happier to run things down and strip the value out of them rather than try and cut their losses and walk away. There are entire multimillion pound movies they’ve just written off rather than sold on.
Quite surprised NZ is so light on broadcast legislation - you would at least assume the main commercial channel would have some commitments to local content and news content to fulfil. This case really does show how dangerous foreign media ownership can be without appropriate protections in place.
