Stan operates in a highly competitive streaming market and has achieved a creditable performance in subscriber growth and increased profits in the 2024 financial year, when both television and publishing earnings fell.
And for Stan Sport to justify its existence, it needed a go-to sport given its main competitor, Foxtel, has streaming rights to many premium sports including NRL and AFL.
There are plenty of streaming services vying for our eyeballs and wallets, and must-see content determines which we choose. Adding all 380 Premier League matches will bulk up Stan Sport content.
As Nine calls it, Stan Sport is taking its next big leap.
The announcement of Nine’s soccer coup coincided with a report from audience measurement agency OzTAM with additional granular detail of how Australians are allocating their TV set watching time.
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The challenged free-to-air networks will be pleased with the findings that 61 per cent of all TV set viewing is accounted for by linear television – the main Nine, Seven, Ten, ABC and SBS channels – and a further 8.2 per cent is spent watching BVOD (catch-up television on digital services such as 9Now and iView).
The report says the 30 per cent remaining is shared by streaming services – dominated by Netflix.
The trouble is that this report stands in contrast to the survey by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which says the proportion of Australian adults watching free-to-air TV has declined from 71 per cent in 2017 to 46 per cent in 2024.
The disparity between the two sets of findings appears to be methodology, but few could dispute that broadcast television has been in structural decline for a decade.
One of the clear shortcomings of the OzTAM analysis is that it does not take into account viewing from devices other than televisions, so it won’t capture what particularly younger Australians watch on their phones, tablets or commuters.
With this in mind, bulking up Stan Sport’s subscriber numbers appears to be a pretty solid strategy.
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