Has the internet ruined Broadcast Television?

By replacing linear, scheduled programming with huge libraries of on-demand content, have the business models and power structures of traditional tv been toppled for good?

In this episode, Amanda Lotz - award-winning author, professor and research leader at Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre - explains the profound impact of the internet on broadcast television, along with how on-demand viewing has transformed audience engagement and the business models of traditional TV.

We also delve into the evolution of television, the rise of streaming services like Netflix, and the changing metrics of success in the industry, and touch on the future of traditional broadcasting and the broader concept of video consumption in a digital age.

Check out the episode here.

Gareth King (00:31)

Amanda, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the show.

Amanda (00:34)

I'm very pleased to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Gareth King (00:36)

Before we get into it, can you tell us a bit about the work that you do and how you came to this area of expertise?

Amanda (00:42)

I began studying television. I was, I described myself, I guess back then as a media scholar, I still do. I trained in the late 90s. And my object moved on me. So I was based in the US at that time. I'm American, I've been in Australia since 2019.

Everything about how the industry worked in the US started to change right around 2000 when I started in the field. And I figured out pretty quickly that one of the consequences of the business changing was that the stories were changing. Like, so when you change the way the machine works in terms of the business of television, you could change what kind of shows got made. And that was pretty interesting to me.

And so that really set off on a journey that I didn't expect to be quite so long. But the distribution model in terms of the arrival of the internet and the business model in terms of being able to have subscriber-funded or consume- funded video television, both of those are pretty significant changes.

And so I've been tracing the relationship between how that changes both the work worlds of those who work in the industry, as well as trying to understand what they can make, all because I'm interested in the relationship of those stories in the daily life of people around the world. And we still spend a ton of time watching stories and shows and videos, depending on what you want to call them, so that’s my origin story.

Gareth King (02:15)

Yeah, cool. And you mentioned there, you know, there's been obviously a lot of change through that time. As we all know that the introduction of the internet has offered that on-demand viewing, how else did it make the traditional approach to TV obsolete for modern audiences?

Amanda (02:30)

I think the place I'd like to start is sort of what the internet, and I'm doing my little air quotes here for listeners, what the internet means for me. That’s sort of, it's a key object here in your title. The internet in this conversation a distribution technology. It's a way of getting video from one place to another. So, we had previous distribution technologies, broadcasting, and then cable and satellite, more or less in different places. Australia is a little unusual in the degree to which it had very low take up of cable and no satellite.

So different technologies, different distribution technologies can do different things. And the fancy university word for that is affordances. So the affordances of broadcasting, as broadcasting began for radio in the early last century, it was a world-changing technology in much the same way that the internet has been more recently.

But broadcasting as a technology, it can do one, it can send a signal from one, so let's say from nine network out to many. That’s the origin of broadcasting in the word, right? So, it can do one to many over the air, so you know that all you really need is an antenna or set with an antenna in there to be able to get that signal.

And that technology, again, sort of media economics word, is non-excludable. So, if I'm Nine Network and I'm sending out my signal, I can't stop anyone from getting it. And that kind of requires certain business models, and it prevents other business models. But that was, for decades, normal. That's just how it was.

Cable came along and satellite and largely replicated a lot of the affordances of broadcasting in terms of those two were initially one to many technologies, but they were excludable. So, you had to, it didn't go out to everyone, it only went out to those who paid. And so you could limit and that changed the business a bit.

And those features, what the technology can do sort of led the business to work in certain ways. So because of broadcasting, and the capacity limits in terms of how many signals could be available at a certain time, we had a lot of scarcity, so there were few operating. And you had this organisation around a schedule or what you call a linear, right?

Well, what makes internet distribution then so different is that internet distribution, whether it's your mobile phone or it's a wire based NBN line, let's say, it does not have those one to many requirements, it can be many to many, or what we've already called sort of on demand. It's what makes it possible to not have a schedule, to have a library, to let different people watch things at different times, to start and stop. And that's, you think back to how television used to be, that's a real game changer.

And I would argue that audiences couldn't even imagine. I think until quite late, we didn't even realise how limited we were in what we could watch and how we could watch it, until all of a sudden we had these experiences.

Gareth King (05:34)

Speaking of game changers, your book, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, came out in 2007. Having been a leading voice on the future of TV for so many years now, what surprised you the most about how it's all played out since then?

Amanda (05:48)

Probably how long the change has taken. Yeah, so the first edition came out in 07, which was just, I just missed Netflix. And because of that, it necessitated a second edition, which I did in 2014. And even at that point, streaming was pretty early stages. And so, I think when you do the kind of work that I do in terms of like understanding, okay, the business model works like this, the technology can do this. And then you try to understand what should happen. We could see where we are now easily 20 years ago. And so, the fact that it has taken 20 years to get there, I guess that has been the most surprising to me.

Gareth King (06:36)

Right, yeah, and look that would be something interesting to kind of get into as we go through this, whether that rate of change may increase as we move forward. But you popularised the concept of the post network era. Can you briefly explain how that's defined for audiences?

Amanda (06:53)

Yeah, so I'm trying to think, it doesn't apply, the periodisation doesn't apply as well in the Australian context. But it was a way of acknowledging that even though we still had television, we were talking about television and how it was changing in the early 2000s, it was a periodisation to recognise that the industry and the experience of television had changed before.

So in the US, the network era runs from the beginning of television in the 50s up until kind of the mid 80s. And then in, and this is the part that doesn't really happen in Australia. From the mid 80s to the early 2000s, we sort of have what I call the multi-channel transition. And this was the period of time in which cable became adopted and Americans began to access far more channels.

So, by the end of the 80s, over half of Americans had cable. And just as a point of reference, Australia barely ever hit above 30%. And Australians didn't start to get cable until the late 90s.

Gareth King (07:56)

Yeah, that's what I was just thinking. I can remember the first few people I ever knew had it, like their parents had it in their house. And it's like, wow, look at all these channels. And that would have been late 90s. I think it was Foxtel or something like that. Yeah.

Amanda (08:12)

Yeah, that would have been it. And so those early in the US, those early systems were smaller. They may have only been about 20, 30 channels. But still, that era and that process of people adopting it broke up the scarcity in a way that really doesn't happen in Australia until 2009 with the multi-channels.

And so the post-network era in the US was sort of, well, I thought we were sort of more at the beginning of it when I originally wrote in 2007, but it certainly has taken a while to come into form. And it's sort of just that acknowledgement that the environment for accessing video isn't limited just to what at that point had been hundreds of cable channels, but also this arrival of this on-demand space that has continued to evolve steadily.

I do think we're, if you were to ask me where I think we are now, it doesn't feel the sand beneath my feet is shifting every year in the way that it did for a really long time. I think we're starting to stabilise. We'll still have a lot of change. I think we have a lot of services that are probably not going to make it. But I think everyone can see the shape of probably where we're heading in the next 10 years in a way that was not the case for quite a while.

Gareth King (09:17)

Do you think that the reason it may have taken so long was due to development not happening as fast as possible? Or was it pushback and stalling, say, maybe from those traditional broadcasters?

Amanda (09:47)

Yeah, it's somewhat different things in different places. It's not a coincidence that UK and Australia had, you know, what is it, iPlayer at the BBC and iView here before there was any on demand service in the US. And that was the power of the companies at that point in the US that owned, the US cable providers became the internet providers and most of them also owned one of the big content studios.

And so they were protecting businesses there because of all of that intellectual property. They were very concerned about what had happened with music happening in video in terms of piracy and ready access. And so the established industry managed to stall things, I think, pretty effectively for quite some time. The other thing, too, that sort of makes a difference market by market was the national approach to internet availability and pricing. And so because video better compression and internet speeds, that too sort of changed the time scale in different places.

And then the technologies of reception, right? Like think we can't underestimate 2007 as the year that the smartphones come out and 2010 tablets in terms some money having access to devices that really help them begin to engage with screens in a very different way.

Gareth King (11:18)

Yeah, and that engaging with screens in the concept of television, one of the things I've thought about with this is whether the internet and tech has changed the experience of watching TV.

Even I can remember once upon a time in that linear programming, a TV or a movie, it was an event, you know, like that was what you would kind of gather around for. It's like be at my house at 8:30, I don't know, they're playing Jaws on channel seven or something tonight. And then it feels like now as we've moved along and everything's so readily available when you want it, you can kind of the experience that you're enjoying by adding television into the background in that format.

So rather than being the centrepiece, it's almost an accessory to an event. Is that something that you would say has generally happened, or is TV still as big as drawcard as it once was in various forms?

Amanda (12:14)

I think it varies a lot by age group. So the thing I have teenagers, and things fascinating to me is the way that they walk through the house often with their headphones on, but playing shows, which might be, let's say the 19th time through Gilmore Girls on Netflix, or it might be the Sidemen on YouTube, and a series of other videos that have all been queued up.

But they come in, they make their lunch and they move through the house. That's all I would call all that television, in the way that I probably had a radio on when I was that age. But I think what's also important is there's been, I think, an assumption that that's the only way anyone's watching. And that also from some of the work that we've been doing talking to viewers isn't true. It's still the case that more than half of time Australians spend watching movies in the home, they're watching with someone else, and almost half the time that they're watching scripted series, they're with someone else.

And so the screens, the on demand, the way that it interacts with sort of the human condition is really varied. And we do see a lot of old patterns continuing. I guess I think the takeaway that I'd have is that it provides people with much more flexibility. So, I would look back at that moment that you reference and remember Like, oh, we can't get home in time to watch such and such, or, oh, I have homework that night, or, you know, the way in which audiences were beholden to the schedule.

And so I think probably the biggest change, and, you know, if you talk to young people, they just cannot even fathom scheduling their life around everything that they would watch in a way that was just normal for folks in their forties and fifties and older.

Gareth King (14:14)

Yeah, totally. And I think that finding something to suit whatever your current state or need might be, it's something that you've spoken about previously in the different types of audience motives. Would you say that on-demand viewing was inevitable as a solution to that?

Amanda (14:32)

I don't think inevitable because one of the things that's really surprising and when I think about that kind of those moments of transition from the mid 90s to really let's say 2015,  audiences we didn't know what we were missing, right? Like there was no push from on the viewer side really for these technologies. And I think back to the American experience of Netflix rolling out, Netflix was for a really long time just a way to get videos by mail. And that was its first core business.

And the extent to which the company really had to market and convince people that what it provided was something different and better. And part of that was that digital video recorders had been pretty significantly adopted in the US because the cable companies kind of gave them to you.

So, people were doing a fair bit of time shifting already, and they had all those channels. And so there was, I think, a real tension between whether a streaming service could actually be worthwhile. The vibe for a long time in the US was that this Netflix thing wasn't gonna happen.

And so it really was a negotiation between, you know, that service and it's not coincidental that it was Netflix, right? Netflix was, didn't have, wasn't still earning tons and tons of money in the old way. So it was invested in change and it was invested in bringing something new to viewers, and they have responded.

Gareth King (15:53)

Netflix is such a good example. I remember, you know, the first time I heard that it used to be something delivered to your letterbox, I was blown away at what seemed like a much more incremental change, from, you know, say Blockbuster and video shops to the kind of the world of streaming. But would you say if Netflix was that leader when they started to invest into streaming, would you say that either that or was it something else that was the kind of particular moment when the digital world's impact on breaking that broadcast TV stranglehold became kind of undeniable?

Amanda (16:39)

You know, I think I'm going to keep, I'm to move back and forth here between the national contexts and then they are pretty different. But I Australia, really the key moment in the story was 2009 and the launch of the multichannels. Because it's at that point that the business model of those linear broadcasters kind of takes the hit that they won't come back from.

And to be fair, if we look at their revenue, they were in decline from the early 2000s. So I think that the kind of the coming realisation and threat of that end of that magic scarcity that they had for so long, and then the reality, which was even though they were able to own or license effectively the multi-channels as well. So, Nine went to NineGo and Gem and all those.

They went from the cost of programming one channel to the cost of programming three or four. And they had to have known that this was going to happen, but the reality is there was no new advertising money. So, their costs increase, but there's no new revenue. There isn't magic new money. And that really began the destabilisation.

And so you see then from 2009, if you look at something like the hours of drama that they're producing, it starts to decline. They're starting to buy more stuff overseas and that's a lot of what's on the other channels. And so, I think in the US or in Australia you have what you can get on broadcast television eroding, and at an earlier point than maybe you do in some other places.

And that that effectively then just, you know, like because Australians, so few Australians had adopted cable, which I kind of understand as it wasn't a great option, right? It was really expensive, and you didn't get a lot for it. So, you know, it made sense. This is what happens when we don't have competition. You had a market though that was so hungry for more choice. And that's how I explain that there's a fair bit of unauthorised accessing of Netflix before it's officially here. There's a pretty big pirate culture in Australia in the early internet environment. All of that makes sense because people weren't having free access to the kinds of content that they were interested in.

And so Australia runs to the streaming services. I haven't looked at the numbers in the last year or so, but I want to say from 2020, Australia was the most subscribed country to Netflix by population. And I think that it speaks to the lack of choice in the marketplace and that relatively, yes, it's a thing you have to pay for, but so many other markets were paying so much already.

In the US, you had 90 % of households paying at least $100 US a month for cable, back from kind of the 90s. And so that too kind of shaped how the sector developed. The US is figuring out there was a ridiculous amount of money available in the market because of those conditions. There was much less money available in the marketplace here because you were really overwhelmingly dependent on advertising.

Gareth King (20:05)

Yeah, and obviously there's been a huge kind of qualitative hit as those advertising dollars have run to whether it's, BVOD or even something, you know, like YouTube advertising. But do you think that Netflix may have been taken up so successfully in Australia because our networks here just could not afford to kind of bid on any of the content, from let's say the American industry, which would be a behemoth?

Amanda (20:33)

When I first got here, I kept asking, how do you have three broadcasters? When I realised that there were like less than 30 million households, right? So, the US had 10 times the number of households and for a really long time had only three broadcast networks. I think this is, you're right. It's all kind of simple economics. There probably shouldn't have ever been a third broadcast network in Australia. It's probably the case now that Australians would be much better served if there were only one, and one that would have enough have access to enough advertising dollars to really be able to put together a stronger offering.

Gareth King (21:15)

Yeah right, that's so interesting to hear because I remember, you know, I grew up in, in Victoria. It was like seven, nine, 10 ABC SBS. And that felt so small, like so limiting. So, it's interesting to hear that three, the commercial ones was excessive for what our population was probably like, I don't know, 20 million, less or something back then.

In terms of those commercial networks that we just mentioned, they're kind of pushing now into setting up their own BVOD stations to try and capture some of that user behaviour now. Do you think these are merely kind of life support for these networks? Or will there be a way that they could eventually capitalise on that and stay competitive?

Amanda (22:06)

Probably not. Humans right now just have so much choice and even the BVOD options aren't... It's the stuff that's already on, so it's a convenience option, and then it's a bunch of really old cheap content.

Gareth King (22:16)

Yeah, look, that's, that's exactly it. And made me think of, you know, sometimes I might, I'll be making lunch if I'm working from home and I might have like the TV on in the living room, and I see what's going on during the day. And I'm just thinking, this is absolute brain rot stuff. Oh my god how have they kind of been reduced to this?

And then as you said when I do look at the BVOD stuff and the big hits on there is something like Married At First Sight or like a terrible local remake of an international success story, I'm just I just can't imagine how the local industry is surviving or maybe it isn't?

In the past when we referred to something as a hit what kind of metrics were we talking about with that, and as audiences and platforms have just fragmented further and further and further, has this accepted hit metric reduced and fragmented as audiences have, or is it still kind of kept where it was?

Amanda (23:23)

Yeah, that's one of my favourite things to talk about. Right, so like a hit, I think we can regard as something that is the most watched. Like Netflix, every day they have their, these are the top 10 titles in Australia. And something has to be the most watched. It's just math.

And I think especially for those of us who lived through the before, it's very easy for our brains to believe that being number one on Netflix is similar to being number one on Australian television in a week in 1990. And numerically, it's just not. And part of this is that the way that hits on streaming are quantified is an entirely different number.

So, you've got sort of two things happening. You have almost all the time you're getting a global number. So that's kind of hard to compare to the past. And then the other thing that you have is it's a cumulative number. So, it's this week's viewers plus next week's viewers, and so like 15 million people have watched a thing. And the way that audience data was gathered in a pre-digital time, we don't have anything to kind of reasonably compare.

What I would love to have is in, let's say, on one day in the year 2000, how many people around the globe watched an episode of Friends? And that's the number that we need to be comparing with how many people have watched Stranger Things. And so, no, we are not at all talking about the same numbers. And that really does, lead us to misunderstand a bit what's going on.

And then the other thing that I've been trying to pull apart, given what Netflix does and doesn't make public, there are roughly 5,000 titles in any given Netflix library. We're getting data about the top 10. If we look at some of the additional data that they've been giving us, you know, sort of like their whole library over six months, it's global data, which is limiting.

But looking at that, it seems that that top 10 might be accounting for just like two or 3 % of viewing. So most of the viewing on Netflix isn't the things that are getting pushed in our face. Clearly, because Netflix has very good retention rates relative to other streamers and relative to these kind of businesses historically, people legitimately like the service. They pay money and they keep paying money. So, people are happy. Netflix can see what people are watching that makes them happy. They are letting the rest of us kind of exist in this world in which we think hits are really important, but I'm skeptical.

Gareth King (26:21)

It makes total sense that, obviously, Netflix would be driven by an algorithm which enhances the service for any given user to potentially be served stuff that they like. But that point there around these are the top 10 Netflix shows, that's something I'll keep in mind next time I’m looking through that library with something to watch and it's telling me this is the best thing today. I'll be a bit more skeptical about it.

On the topic of Netflix and you say that was the kind of the big disruptor. Looking back to when they were delivering say DVDs to your mailbox or whatever it was before they introduced their streaming platform, what would you say that the biggest mistake traditional broadcasters made in underestimating or reacting too slowly to this new technology?

Amanda (27:17)

I try to have sympathy because I think we have to remember the constraints that these decisions are made in, right? I know this period of time better in the US than here. And the sector was making extraordinarily high amounts of money. Like it's really just been in the last few years that cable subscriptions, just the last month, the US had fallen to 50 % of homes having cable.

And that's really where all of the money was. And as long as that money was coming in, it was so in their interest to just continue to, as one executive described it, ride the dinosaur down. So I think if we look at a company like Disney, we see probably one of the more graceful transitions. I still don't think we see the Disney Plus service having a strategy that is characteristic of an on-demand service in the same way that I think Netflix, most days, I think Netflix actually has a strategy that aligns.

So that's all to say that I think the mistakes were largely understandable and that you probably had a lot of, well, especially men of a certain age who thought that they could get out of here before it would affect them, retire before the business falls apart.

And so, I think you also then have to look at the stock market and the investor class for being willing to not reward the companies that were willing to take the longer bet, right? There's just so much pressure on quarterly performance that it was hard to have a five-year strategy when you needed to have a five-year strategy.

So, I think those are the reasons why it just, nobody moved fast enough or recognised that the business was going to be quite different. I guess the thing that I've been writing about lately, no one talked about and no one's still talking about the way that scarcity made the business what it was. So, there was this invisible thing that accounted for profitable the sector was and the strategy. It's like nobody knew, like, we can do this because they have no choice. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. But that was true.

And so we thought that people love television because so many people watched it. But the truth is people watched a lot of things just because it was on because they had no other choice. And we know that now because things came along largely from outside of the sector. I think Netflix and YouTube are probably the two bigs. You give them choice and they're out of here. They have found things that connect to their interests or their sensibilities or give them what they want at the moment that they want it.

And so understanding that a world in which you can't rely on scarcity to push a consumer into a certain place, nobody has, I think, really recognised the difference in the strategy needed in that environment.

Gareth King (30:28)

Yeah, right. That dinosaur analogy is brilliant. I love that. But those changes in the television business, you mentioned in your book, ‘We Now Disrupt This Broadcast’ that has led to a new golden age of TV. I don't think there's many streaming service watchers out there at the moment that wouldn't think there's so much great stuff, it's just kind of which platforms you actually want to be subscribed to at any given moment. Can you briefly explain how the new golden age of TV has happened and what's come out of it?

Amanda (30:59)

You know, I think that age, really brought to you by the American consumer. It was really the decade and a half to two decades of Americans paying just unconscionable cable bills, that provided the kind of revenue that the studios needed to start to experiment with some new shows. And I think a lot of that happened more on cable than it has for the streaming services.

And what happens when we move into the streaming services is it starts to get really difficult to see the patterns or to see the whole view. And so, you do have, because you have these really contradictory stories in an on-demand world. You have Adam Sandler movies and wrestling. At the same time, you have clearly what are efforts to win Oscar awards and sort of tiny art movies or series. And so that I think, has been a real challenge for people to wrap their heads around that Netflix can simultaneously be all of those things because not everyone is watching any of those four things, right?

Whereas in that linear era, you really, it was a time of having a brand. You had a certain kind of show on your channel and people came to you because they came to expect that was what they would offer. And I think what I found when I arrived was that a lot of Australians associate that content with Netflix because although it had originated from American cable networks, when it came to Australia, a lot of it came via Netflix.

And so I think they're, depending on where you're located in the globe, you may think of those shows as being streaming shows, but many of those titles would have been cable shows in the US.

Gareth King (32:43)

Yeah, and I guess networks had this kind of star power that they could use to draw on. And obviously the same through all forms of entertainment. But one thing I did want to speak to you around as well was, we know in Australia there's local content quotas. A, are these still relevant? B, what is going on with those? And C, how would these compete with these international platforms not bound by these rules?

Amanda (33:23)

All right, all right, so the actual policy of local content quotas is pretty silly in this environment, but that doesn't mean that the policy goals can't be achieved. They just need to be achieved in a different way. So, quotas worked on a schedule because broadcasters, like each and every minute of each and every day matters to them a lot, because it's scarcity.

Not with a library. Like you say Netflix, you have to have 10 % like, all right, I mean, that's going to cost us. We have to license it, but it's just going to sit there and nobody's ever going to watch it and it's fine. Right. So, a library doesn't really deal with quotas well. The conversation in Australia in recent years has been, well, not a quota exactly. Let's say that the services have to, if they make, let's say $10 million a year off of Australian subscribers, they'd have to spend a certain amount of that making shows in Australia. Okay, that at least functionally could work.

Then we need to know though, what is the purpose of that policy? Is the purpose of that policy to make jobs for Australians or is the purpose of that policy to have shows about Australia, which historically the reason why we have content quotas was to make shows about Australians. So, those things could be possible if, you know, it's sort of tuned the right way.

But this question of national content is one we've been looking at in a lot of our research, and it's tricky. If 60 some percent of Australians are willing to pay monthly for Netflix, and they know darn well that that isn't going to get them much, if any Australian content, like it's like 1% of the library, right? Like people are choosing to spend their money on a thing that doesn't have Australian content. That's significant.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean that they don't want it, right? And so I think middle ground here is taking advantage of the mechanisms that exist that sort of maybe make more sense to make sure those cultural stories are available. One of the big problems with Netflix or Stan or all those others are you do have to pay for them, right? And so, you know, we should not be putting our cultural policy behind paywalls. So, we have the ABC and SBS and those seem to be entities that probably would have access to more Australians or Australians would have more ready access to if we were concerned that there are Australian stories made available.

I just think that there are policy levers that make more sense in this context. Part of why they worked so well for so long was that the commercial broadcasters were making so much money. And it really wasn't too much to ask of them. And again, Australian broadcasters, their whole point of being was to attract the attention of Australians. The streamers, even Netflix with 67 % of Australians, that's still like 3 % of their you know, market.

So, in order for policy to work well, you kind of have to line up all the pieces in a way that, you know, makes sense. At least policy is more effective that way. And so the world has just changed quite a bit from the era in which those content quotas could work.

Gareth King (36:32)

That makes total sense and my next question that would have come out of there was around what that would all mean for, you know, these broad audience broadcasters like the ABC and SBS. Is there anything that they could do? Could they kind of plug into these streamers to, I don't know, leverage relationships or get features? I'm not sure how it works, but...

Amanda (37:05)

Yeah, no, it's interesting. I don't have as much data, perhaps, as they do at this point. But it's interesting to watch the experiments over time. Because right now, there are quite a few original ABC shows that are now available on Netflix. And I'll be honest, if I'm going to watch something, it's probably going to be through Netflix, just because the interface is so much easier. And it's going to be more likely to surface a thing that it knows that I'm interested in.

You know, it would be interesting to know whether more or, know, what relatively are the number of people who are watching a thing, Australians specifically, who are watching, let's say, Fisk on Netflix versus Fisk on iView and ABC linear. Like, so there's, interesting things to learn there.

ABC and SBS are in really different positions. SBS, relative to our interviews and surveys, Australians are pretty happy with SBS. And I think part of that is SBS is doing a specific thing, right? It's not trying to be everything to everyone. It has, especially SBS online, it's curated in a way that people know what to expect. Obviously not everyone's going there, but it's identifiable to viewers as they know what they can get there and it's different from what they can get anywhere else in large part. I think trying to program at the ABC has got to be maybe the hardest job in the country.

Gareth King (38:25)

Yeah, look, I was just it could be an indicator that they're doing actually the right job because if you've got everybody saying that the ABC is doing it wrong by them, maybe the ABC has got the balance right. I don't know.

But there's been a lot of changes in what we call television over the last 20 years. In another 20 years, do you think traditional TV broadcasting will exist at all? Or will everything be replaced by say an internet and technology only viewing landscape or something else?

Amanda (39:00)

I think to some degree that's going to be up to the government and policy. We tend to take a lot of cues from the UK, which may or may not be a good thing relative to the size and makeup of our countries. They're a bit different. But the UK is very aggressively moving away from broadcasting as a distribution technology. And they're trying to study and figure out how to do that in a way that's not harmful.

And I think there's some conversation here about that as well. I'm not deep in the data of those conversations to understand why. My own sort of less super expert in this particular area sense is that given especially the nature of Australia's terrain and the difficulty that we've had with internet signals in a lot of places that, you know, rushing into shutting off broadcasting may not have as much value as it might in other places.

I think, maintaining a national broadcaster and perhaps one commercial broadcaster free to air, and if they want to also distribute online, then fair be. But sort of the idea that we should take what exists right now as Australian television and reproduce it via internet distribution, I don't see a lot of evidence what audiences want. But I think that having those sort of backup technologies, we have those moments.

Most of us live lives that are pretty full and it's sort of hard to get us to show up at a certain time anymore. But having those kind of contingencies doesn't seem like a bad thing. I think coming back to what is the job of the ABC? The ABC's job shouldn't be to be everything to everyone, right? But I think they could much more clearly announce themselves as we're the place for Australian content or we're the place for, I mean, they're very well known for their news. But to identify what is their point of distinction that you kind of can't get if you're in Australia, it's hard to get from anywhere else.

If you want to connect to your we've got something for you, and really sort of not try to meet everyone's very particular special need because they just can't. But to figure out what is the thing that's really important at a societal level, double down on it so that people know that that's the thing they can go to. And that could be valuable over broadcast in the long run.

Gareth King (41:32)

Yeah, absolutely. Defining a much stronger identity, what it stands for, could be a really good option. Because, as you touched on a couple of minutes ago, just turning off broadcast would probably be a mistake, because we know that broadcast is the thing that still has that ability to create those cultural moments that everybody can kind of just rally behind now, whether it's, AFL Grand Final, I don't know, people watch Melbourne Cup Day, like all sorts of things, but you know, the most recent one that I can think of that kind of captured everybody was the Matildas in the World Cup.

Amanda (42:02)

Absolutely. Nobody thought those numbers would be possible again. The national team, I think part of it is the commercial model is trying to recreate that on a constant basis with many different things. Recognising that people do like coming together and sharing in moments like that, but those aren't the everyday. And so you can't to have a business model based on that anymore.

Gareth King (42:26)

No, totally. Hopefully they stick around because we do need those shared moments for everybody, especially as streaming and digital gets so much more fragmented. But just to finish up, where do you think the idea of television goes from here? And will the technology and streaming-based stuff that we've been talking about inevitably be able to deliver completely unique, customised content for every viewer at speed and scale?

Like perhaps, you go on the internet and you're served up adverts that are based on your browsing, like, will we potentially get to a point where you're watching a film and it knows everything you like and it's kind of populated with that?

Amanda (43:06)

I've started using the word video a lot more, or at least that's what I've been thinking about, or when I talk to Australians about what they're doing. And part of that is to also include social media feeds, which we haven't talked a lot about, but I'd say are very important to the daily. It's a big video part of most people's daily lives.

Last year, Meta revealed in an earnings call that 60 % of time spent on Facebook and Insta was watching video. And you add that to, we know really high levels of TikTok use and then YouTube. And when I've, in the interviews that we've been doing, I'd say especially sort of the 25 to 40 year old range, what being on social media is for a lot of people at this point is short videos related to their interests.

We've been calling it a personal media stream and you talk to them and you know, some people it's just like all motorbikes. Like I love motorbikes. I have all these videos about motorbikes. It's coming in my feed. For some it's often these really different interests. Like I like crafts and history and netball.

And so like when you then think about the crush of life and work and family, right? And you get like 10 minutes of leisure at the end of the day, you pull out that feed and it is kind of delivering, you know, things that are interesting to you. I think the important thing to understand is that those people still like movies. They still like series. But what we see are individuals kind of negotiating time and life and, you know, the pressure of time, think is a really big one.

And so that, that feed is kind of replacing what would have been for me 20 years ago. All right. I got the dishes done. The kids are taken care of. I'm going to see what's on. Right. So if you got less than an hour, you know, maybe you do just swipe your way through and then on Friday you watch three episodes of that really great new show on Netflix or whatever. Right.

And so the patterns shifting. as for like, don't think we're that atomised, right? I don't think we need individualised videos, which surely AI would make for us. But I do, I think the technologies that we have now are helping us to maximise our leisure time and to be able to find the very narrow interest in whatever craft or sport and have other people who are talking about it and who are knowing about a way that was impossible before the internet.

Gareth King (45:47)

Yeah and it seems like as you've just said there, it allows us to greatly increase the efficiency of getting into that leisure that we want as opposed to, I don't know, hoping for the best. On that do you think that the concept of television is just a hangover from the actual box of the past? Because you said something there around whether you call it video or even just kind of watching. It feels like a much broader catchall. So I'll be interested to see how plays out as we move forward.

Thanks so much for that Amanda, what’s on the horizon for you and where can people follow what you're up to?

Amanda (46:34)

 The horizon is I'm at the beginning of a four year project aimed at understanding how Australians use media now. And so I'm asking very, very basic questions. Just tell me about what you do and trying to understand, you know, the subgroups maybe now that exist.

I am easy to find in many places, LinkedIn and BlueSky the most, where I am either AD Lotz on LinkedIn or actually on my website, amandalotz.com, kind of gets you anything you would want.

Gareth King (47:05)

Brilliant. Amanda, thank you so much.

Amanda (47:08)

My pleasure, thanks for having me.