In a phone call to investors this morning, Robert Thomson, News Corp Australia CEO has all but confirmed that Foxtel will launch its own video streaming entertainment service. You might think that Foxtel has already dabbled in this area .. and it has. Aren’t Foxtel Now and Foxtel Go already basically the same thing?
During the call, Mr Thomson stated that Australians have proven that they are willing to pay for premium content, with Mr Thomson confirming that Foxtel currently has 3.144 Million subscribers already.
Fundamentally, what we are seeing is a real growth in the number of Australians prepared to pay for premium programming and there is little more premium than exclusive sports rights,
Subscribers for Kayo are currently sitting around 382,000, with 331,000 subscribers paying for the services, and Foxtel Now is currently sitting at 460,000 both paid and unpaid, though this is down from the 567,000 subscribers the service had, thanks in part to the end of the TV drama Game of Thrones ending.
The old story about Foxtel was that it had maxed out on subscribers that there were a strictly limited number of Australians prepared to pay for content and that we’d hit that limit. Frankly, that’s clearly not the case.
It has been widely expected that Foxtel would be launching a separate video streaming entertainment service now for a few months but it begs the question – what does this mean for Foxtel Now?
Given pricing for Foxtel Now starts at $25 per month for the basic package and all the way up to $104 once you add all the packages, any new streaming service would have to be as competitive as Netflix and Stan currently are. It’s hard to see how Foxtel could package up some of its content into a bundle like that – but anything is possible.
We will be keeping an eye out for any new information regarding the new Foxtel video streaming entertainment service as it comes to hand, but in the meantime, we want to ask you, would you consider paying for another video streaming service? Let us know in the comments below.
