Damien Venuto: TV changes - why 6pm news not the only platform at risk

COMMENT:

Wendy Petrie and Simon Dallow aren't the only famous faces that will be sweating as the television industry grapples with the dramatic drop in advertising.

With no guarantees of when advertising will return to pre Covid-19 levels, a media industry insider told the Herald there'll be serious questions asked of the production costs that go into other expensive shows on air on both TVNZ and Three.

While TVNZ has announced up to 90 cuts across its business, MediaWorks has so far resisted taking the knife to its TV arm – a decision largely driven by the continuing efforts to sell this part of the business.

If and when MediaWorks TV does eventually sell, the new owner will face the same challenge as TVNZ in making sense out of numbers that have exposed the frailties across the business.

The insider says this will inevitably lead to new ownership making similarly tough calls across the business.

The discussions underpinning the decisions being made at the media companies will come ultimately down to the structures that led to television becoming such an expensive behemoth to produce.

The source singled out the breakfast shows as an example of type of programming that might go under the microscope.

If executives are going to seriously consider reducing the 6pm news to one presenter then a strong argument could also be made for reducing the number of presenters on the breakfast shows.

Both TVNZ and Three's breakfast shows feature high profile presenters, delivering their segments from expensive sets.

Hayley Holt, John Campbell and Jenny-May Clarkson command the fortress at TVNZ, while Duncan Garner, Mark Richardson and Amanda Gillies sit in the pastel chamber at Three.

Add to this the sports and weather presenters as well as regular contributors and you have a platform that isn't cheap to maintain.

At a time when the advertising was still flowing at its regular rate, this was a luxury television broadcasters were willing to pay for.

The Advertising Standards Authority's spend figures released on May 20 showed that television pulled in $579 million in revenue in 2019, compared to the $281 million pulled in by radio.

Despite this gulf in overall revenue, the radio industry has long been the more stable sector of the media industry and has also played a role in propping up MediaWorks' struggling TV business.

The impact of Covid-19 has hammered advertising revenue for both April and May and it has been slow going ever since.

The TV companies should, perhaps, proceed with caution when making changes to certain parts of the business.

A longtime media agency source told the Herald that 6pm news remains an incredibly valuable property to TV companies and still pulls in strong audiences every evening. This also applies to breakfast shows, but to a lesser extent.

The question then is whether it would pay to mess with this rather than perhaps making a few changes elsewhere in the business.

One argument against changing the dual-person format is that viewers have grown accustomed to this and they might reject any alteration.

However, this hypothesis was tested during the lockdown when a single TVNZ presenter delivered the news without a hitch. This also happened to coincide with some of the biggest audiences 6pm news shows had seen in years.

If anything, it offered a reminder that the viewers were there for the news rather than the presenters.

Sources say the emergence of Netflix and other streaming services has made it far more difficult for TV broadcasters to hold on to an audience as the evening progresses.

This, in turn, places pressure on the programming that comes after the 6pm news – and leaves shows like TVNZ's Seven Sharp and MediaWorks' The Project vulnerable to changes.

There have long been question marks over the future of The Project, which despite its high production costs has long lagged behind its competitor at TVNZ.

These questions are likely to persist under new ownership and it will come down to how much appetite they have to keep it going.

Time is no longer a luxury that television companies can afford.

The rapid impact of Covid-19 has forced the broadcasters to confront their legacy structures far faster than they would've liked to. Changes that could have previously been staggered over years now have to be made immediately.

Whether they like it or not, viewers are in for a few changes.