Streaming lifeline for Nine

The entire media industry has been struggling under the weight of a collective advertising downturn, but Nine has come out the best of a bad bunch, announcing its December half-yearly results on Thursday morning. With Nine holding a number of assets in streaming and publishing (such as Stan, as well as mastheads The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age), the media giant was shielded from advertising downturns that whacked rival broadcaster Seven earlier this month.

Nine’s reported revenue fell 2% to $1.38 billion in the second half of 2023, with net profit dropping 40% to $113.8 million. Nine’s broadcast division saw revenues drop 9%, while publishing was down 4% despite subscribers across the newspapers up 7%. Streaming service Stan carried the company’s results, with revenue up 11% off the back of subscriber growth. 

Chair Peter Costello also praised the “breadth” of the company, saying that restructures had “enhanced [its] competitive position”. 

Nine this week announced it would be acquiring the free-to-air broadcast rights to the Melbourne Cup from this year, sublicensing the rights in a $40 million agreement led by wagering company Tabcorp. 

Crikey understands Nine is also in talks to poach star SEN broadcaster Gerard Whateley for its Paris 2024 Olympics coverage later this year, having missed out on Seven’s Bruce McAvaney. It is understood talks are ongoing for an arrangement between Whateley’s two broadcast employers, SEN and Fox, and Nine. 

Bursting News Corp’s Hubbl

Foxtel this week launched yet another entry into the streaming plug-in device market, with Hubbl, its competitor to Google’s Chromecast and Amazon’s Fire Stick, announced this week. 

Hubbl is set to aggregate streaming services from across providers, with a set top box costing $99 and a smart television known as Hubbl Glass to start at $1,595. This is, of course, in addition to the costs of paying for the streaming services themselves — which in the case of Foxtel’s products are rising (Kayo Basic rose recently to $35 a month, having launched in 2018 at $25).

One sports broadcaster told Media Briefs: “Kayo is the greatest invention since the wheel, but it’s so buggy and glitchy. They do nothing about it, and then have the audacity to raise the price.” 

However, you wouldn’t know of the hit to your wallet if you were reading The Australian’s puff piece about the launch, which declared “there is no monthly subscription to access Hubbl”, despite a note in Hubbl’s press release disclosing that separate app subscriptions are required. At the time of writing, The Australian’s piece remains without a disclosure that Hubbl will still require subscriptions to separate apps. 

Correction-watch 

It’s been a busy week in corrections, with the ABC leading an article, published on Monday, about ANU research into demographics of smokers with a controversial first paragraph. 

The original paragraph read: “If you were asked to picture a typical smoker, you might come up with the following stereotypes: someone who is unemployed, uneducated, Indigenous, and suffering poor mental health.” 

The article went on to report that the strong majority of daily smokers were not Indigenous, in paid employment, had completed Year 12, and were in good mental health. 

The offending paragraph was picked up on social media and received a significant amount of backlash, with the article edited by the next day with an editor’s note.

“A previous version of this story referred to Indigenous people in the first paragraph,” the note reads. 

“That reference has since been removed and we apologise for any offence caused.”

The article remains online, with the first paragraph now reading: “If you were asked to picture a typical smoker, you might not imagine someone employed, educated or who has good mental health.”

Elsewhere, The Courier-Mail had to run a lengthy correction on a story about the upcoming Brisbane City Council elections in which a number of Greens policies were misrepresented. 

“There were some errors in a list of Greens policies for the Brisbane City Council election in yesterday’s Sunday Mail,” the correction read. 

Amongst the most egregious mistakes, printed on February 18, were that the Greens proposed to reduce speed limits on all roads to 30 km/h (instead of on half-a-dozen streets), and cancel the Riverfire festival (they do not). The Courier-Mail also printed that the Greens proposed to allocate $40 million a year (instead of $13 million) for First Nations community organisations.