The free-to-air (FTA) TV advertising marketing market is projected to stagnate over the next five years. The latest results from professional services company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) puts the dollar expectation at the same as it was in 2014.
In 2014 the FTA ad market was at $3,835 million. For the next five years PwC sees the market both growing and dropping between one and two per cent to eventually end up in 2019 at exactly the same as 2014, $3,835 million.
In the overall ad dollars share in the various sectors in Australia, FTA TV still makes up one of the largest segments, with 22.4 per cent share.
While we have a plethora of devices available to us to watch TV on, the TV set is still the dominant stature for watching anything video, a fact much research supports.
Subscription TV
In the subscription TV space, the annual report showed Foxtel’s reshuffle of its pricing options – dropping the price for the basic package down to $25 – paid off. The report stated this move helped Foxtel hold its own when video streaming on demand (SVOD) services Netflix and Stan barged into the picture.
Ad dollars has generally made up only a very small portion of subscription TV revenue, however Foxtel’s CEO Richard Freudenstein predicts this will change.
Per the report, the subscription TV consumer spend is projected to increase from $2,616 million in 2014 to $2,935 million in 2019.
The ad dollars associated with subscription TV are expected to go from $543 million in 2014 to $746 million in 2019, giving the subscription market a 4.4 per cent share in the total ad spend in Australian sectors.
In terms of the SVOD market, PwC questioned whether all players in the market will survive, however there is no indication which ones are projected to cark it.
The report said it could be argued Presto, the streaming arm of Foxtel, is “well-placed to take advantage of rights that are already sewn up through Foxtel”. And Netflix and FetchTV’s agreement – which sees the SVOD giant able to stream its content through the FetchTV set top box – has helped bring in a number of subscribers.
“The current landscape has been likened to the music streaming market, which has been whittle down to just a few main offerings,” said the report.
“We expect a similar outcome in the SVOD space within the forecast period.”
Filmed Entertainment
In terms of filmed entertainment, cinema advertising is expected to increase by $19 million by 2019, up from $96m in 2014 to $115m in 2019.
The spend makes up 0.7 per cent of the total ad spend in Australia in all sectors.
While those going to the cinema was still relatively healthy at 78.6 million in 2014, the report noted the cinema audience continues to decline.
However, the release of Jurassic World this past week has seen cinema consumer spend explode, with The Verge reporting the fourth installation of the Jurassic Park series has earned around half a billion dollars (US) in the first weekend of its opening.
