This episode takes a look at the latest TV ratings, what is making media headlines this week and Foxtel CEO Patrick Delany discusses TV rights for cricket and broadcasting in 4K.

The series is promising to take viewers through every step of the medical emergency, from the moment the call takers answer the triple zero call at the control centre, to the dispatchers managing the logistics of getting crews to the patients, and on the road with the paramedics as they respond to the emergency and treat the injured and the ill.

The new series is screening not long after Nine premiered its series Paramedics from production house WTFN.

Ambulance Australia executive producer Sarah Thornton has been working with Network Ten since early in 2018, where she is working under chief content officer Beverley McGarvey.

Sarah Thornton

For the past 15 years Thornton has been working in TV production in the UK in a number of roles for Discovery, BBC, C4 and Sky, spending time with broadcasters and freelancing.

Ambulance Australia is a licensed format from the British series that TEN has been screening.

Talking about the original, Thornton told Mediaweek: “It is a high-end, premium entertainment factual that has been produced in the UK for five years. Taking the format gives producers access to the technology and the way the stories are packaged, the music etc.”

The series is made by Dragonfly in the UK, which is part of the Endemol Shine group, with Endemol Shine the production company behind the Australian version.

“The executive producer at Endemol Shine is Tony de la Pena and what they have been able to do is get incredible access, which is a major challenge,” said Thornton.

“What we were asking for was different from the usual sort of access. We don’t want to just send a crew along to shadow someone.

“We have rigged five ambulances with fixed cameras and almost a mini-control room. We have spent 72 hours across the busy period of weekends for eight weeks in the control room following the call centre characters.

“We have put the best characters the Ambulance service has to offer in these ambulances and followed them as they go out on calls.

“It was a very ambitious undertaking – for every episode we have five ambulances across New South Wales rigged with over 30 cameras. We had people stationed in all the control centres. There is so much footage, which enables us to tell very personal stories about the paramedics in a way you don’t get if you just dip in and out of the odd shift.”

The access was negotiated with Ambulance NSW with ambulances in several Sydney suburbs.

Thornton was keen to point out the producers didn’t film anyone without receiving prior consent. “There was a very detailed process we followed and we employed someone to work with Ambulance NSW to deal with consent.”

Thornton explained the thing about the rig on the ambulances was that with cameras set up nobody had cameras in their faces. “There was never any talking to patients – we had a field producer on location who would often ride in a car behind with a senior paramedic.

“The consent was always requested by the paramedics before they entered people’s properties.”

Not everybody agreed to take part. Thornton: “As many said no as said yes. Sometimes people weren’t contactable afterwards.”

Each ambulance used in the series was fitted out with around $50,000 of equipment, with cutting edge cameras imported from Germany.

The series runs for eight episodes and Thornton paid tribute to the Endemol Shine production team who worked a minimum of 72-hour weekends for more than two months. “It was a pretty intense couple of months with the busy times late night and early morning on weekends.

“The very passionate ambos would not do anything else.”

With other medical ob docs currently on offer, Thornton said TEN took some time to decide whether to commission their series. “This is not unlike what we have had on the channel in the past with the likes of Bondi Vet and Bondi Rescue. We felt this again was not your average documentary, as I noted earlier – more of a premium entertainment offering.”

Another series telling authentic Australian stories is Secret Life Of Four-Year-Olds. It airs after Ambulance and is being made for Ten by Screentime. Thornton is also EP on this for Ten with Jennifer Collins her counterpart at Screentime.

Dahill joins Essential Media Group from Gordian Media, the production company he launched in 2017 that became a joint venture with NBC Universal and Matchbox Pictures earlier this year.

Prior to this, Dahill was managing director of Keo Films Australia where he oversaw productions including documentary series War on Waste for the ABC and factual and entertainment shows such as River Cottage Australia for Foxtel/SBS, Struggle Street for SBS and Bullied for the ABC.

Dahill’s career also includes seven years at the ABC, where he occupied a number of senior executive positions including head of non-scripted productions, head of network programming and channel controller of ABC1.

His previous roles include director of television at BBC Worldwide Australasia, plus stints at the BBC, ITV and UKTV in the UK, and Discovery Channel Europe.

The new appointment sees Dahill overseeing both scripted and factual production in Australia and New Zealand. He will report directly to Essential Media CEO Chris Hilton.

“We are very excited to welcome Brendan to the Essential Media Group. With his boundless energy, deep knowledge of content and extensive network of friends in the industry he’s a great addition to our team”, said Hilton.

In May 2018, Essential Media announced the launch of Essential Scripted, a new international arm focused on producing premium international scripted content for the small and big screen.

The Essential Media Group (EMG) is an international content company that was formed by the merger of two independent production companies and joint venture partners – Essential Media and Entertainment and Quail Entertainment.

Headed by CEO and executive producer Chris Hilton and CCO and executive producer Greg Quail, EMG was acquired by Kew Media Group in July 2018. EMG has offices in Los Angeles, Dallas Fort-Worth, and Sydney.

By Kruti Joshi

The new-look magazine for UK news conglomerate Guardian News and Media was established in 1919 and has since maintained that it has an international focus. However, with the redesign of the Guardian Weekly, it will now have three different editions – Australian, North American and rest of the world (covering UK and other countries).

“It was never really a product just for expats. It always had an international view,” Guardian Weekly editor Will Dean told Mediaweek. “It’s a window to the world.”

The old versus the new look of the Guardian Weekly

The redesign of Guardian Weekly follows the redesign of the Guardian daily newspaper in the UK, which became a tabloid earlier this year. “The previous Guardian Weekly was based on the old design of the newspaper, which doesn’t exist any more. So we knew we had an opportunity to redesign and relaunch it,” Dean said.

Much of the content in the magazine will be similar in the new editions, except for about four pages in each issue. They will be dedicated to the content to come from or related to North America or Australia in their respective editions.

“It was an obvious move for us. We thought, ‘We have a great team in Australia, who are doing great work. What can we do more for our Australian readers?,’” Dean said.

The person looking after the Australian pages in Guardian Weekly is the deputy news editor of Guardian Australia, Patrick Keneally.

Guardian Australia deputy news editor Patrick Keneally

“It’s pretty clear with the type of content that we do in Australia that the key pillars are politics, environment, social justice issues, refugees and immigration, and asylum and indigenous issues,” Keneally said. “This gives you a feel of what type of things we are going to be showcasing in the Weekly. We are also going to have a regular cartoon there by First Dog On The Moon – it’s one of our most popular items.”

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This is an excerpt from the full article, which appears on Mediaweek Premium. Read the full article here or subscribe to Mediaweek Premium here.

Here is a quick wrap of the leading commercial AM drive timeslots in each metro market.

2GB’s Ben Fordham has held the Sydney timeslot for some time now with Sydney Live after pulling back from full-time duties at the Nine Network to focus on his radio career. He currently ranks #2 overall behind Nova’s Kate, Tim & Marty who broadcast just several floors above him in the same Sydney building.

In Melbourne Tom Elliott has been the longtime drive host at 3AW, where he too ranks #2 overall in the timeslot, behind only Fox FM’s Hughesy and Kate. They aren’t in the same building – but in the same street though!

In Brisbane Mark Braybrook recently took over the drive show, which remains the only local weekday timeslot on the Macquarie Media station.

Sport is the trigger word for ratings in Adelaide radio, which is why the popular Rowey and Bicks command strong figures.

In Perth 6PR calls its drive show Perth Live and host Oliver Peterson had a good survey six with a share that now out-rates one of the four commercial FM drive shows.

Network performance Survey 6, 2018 (share and cume):

Sydney: 2GB with Ben Fordham
10.3% (+1.2), 314,000

Melbourne: 3AW with Tom Elliott
9.9% (+0.1), 331,000

Brisbane: 4BC with Mark Braybrook
3.3% (+0.1), 56,000

NB: The highest-rating AM daypart is 4KQ’s drive music show on 5.4%

Adelaide: Fiveaa with Rowey and Bicks
13.0% (+0.8), 87,000

Perth: 6PR with Oliver Peterson
7.3% (+1.4), 85,000

(The above ratings figures are for the timeslot 4pm-7pm, with all the above drive shows wrapping at 6pm and some starting at 3pm.)

Next Monday: Triple M drive starting to cut through with Mick and Jane

TEN must know that Ali, now in her third series searching for love, is problematic given they proclaimed from the get-go that “no-one deserves love more” (um, really?) before then having a flash-forward to the finale with Ali saying, “I think it’s a love that is definitely going to be everlasting” (yeah right). Cut to her then breaking down in hysterical tears.

That’s almost as desperate as the blokes, who are mostly wannabe comedians (who aren’t funny) or narcissistic sleazeballs (hoping also to be cast in Bachelor In Paradise). In a show where diversity is a white guy speaking in an English accent, it was perhaps unwise to suggest a contestant might be transgender (“I wasn’t born Bill”) because, when the show returned from its commercial break, he said, “I was actually called David!”, which is officially the lamest cliffhanger reveal in the history of reality TV.

TEN is hedging its bets with yet another romance show. In its introduction, it takes credit for the entire genre by reminding us the show began in 1967 before peaking in the 80s with Perfect Match. This time, however, it is all about copying the UK version, which ran for decades with Cilla Black at the helm. Now it’s Julia Morris and she seems to flounder a bit without her I’m A Celebrity co-host because, sadly, Dr Chris Brown is way too tall to be Dexter the robot.

Julia repeats several gags and phrases like “wet stuff”, “hot flush” and “am I allowed to say this?”, which could be a reference to her Logies gaffe. There’s a voiceover guy who sounds like the Osher Günsberg you get when the real Osher isn’t available, and the contestants could be Bachelor and Bachelorette rejects for being too old or too bogan. The cheesy double entendres wear thin after an hour, suggesting there was a very good reason why this show used to run only for 30 minutes.

Given we seem to know too much about The Bachelorette and everyone else’s love lives, the ABC and Netflix are hoping there may be more interest in something we know nothing about, Pine Gap. Jacqueline McKenzie and Stephen Curry are superb in Pine Gap, a new thriller that should satisfy those who love a good spy drama.

Pine Gap

The story cleverly finds ways to get the cast out and about from behind their computers, with hiking trips into the desert and some very stylish houses in Alice Springs on show. Pine Gap is a show you have to pay attention to and that might be too much of an ask for those who watch dating shows. But at least there won’t be any gambling ads on during it.

By Peter Olszewski

Hong Kong broadcaster slashes staff

Hong Kong’s largest television broadcaster Television Broadcasts (TVB) fired 150 staffers on October 5, hot on the heels of winning a copyright case in Australia. The company closed print production of weekly magazine TVB Weekly and cut staff from the production facilities division, the art subdivision, and its non-drama production. This was TVB’s second recent staff layoff, with 100 staffers made redundant in June.

Last month TVB won a copyright infringement case in Australia in which the Australia Federal Court ordered local telecoms including Telstra, Optus, Vocus and TPG to take action within 15 days to block their customers from using illegal set-top boxes, devices used to stream TVB’s copyright content, according to a statement by TVB.

StarHub lays of staff ahead of Aussie entrant

Singapore pay TV platform StarHub, like its telco rivals, is bracing for the launch of a fourth mobile network operator – Australia’s TPG Telecom – in Singapore later this year. This month the company warned staffers that layoffs are on the way in a bid to stay “agile and lean”, as new CEO, Australian Peter Kaliaropoulos – who began the job in July – settles in.

StarHub has shed 107,000 pay-TV subscribers since the first quarter of 2015 and ended June this year with 438,000 pay-TV subs.

Best video quality: #1 Singapore, #2 Australia

UK-headquartered mobile analytics company OpenSignal has developed a video metric that measures exactly what consumers experience when they watch videos based on speed, quality, and overall experience, noting that the fastest speeds are not necessarily those providing the highest-quality viewing.

In the region, South Korea has some of the most powerful networks in the world, and it topped the 69 countries surveyed by OpenSignal for download speed. However, it fell well short of the top mark in overall video quality. Singapore had the highest video quality, while Australia and Taiwan were close behind.

Mashable relaunched in Southeast Asia

Media Prima Digital’s wholly owned subsidiary Rev Asia has agreed with US-based digital media company Ziff Davis to operate Mashable Southeast Asia in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore. Under the agreement, Mashable Southeast Asia will edit and localise the best of Mashable’s offbeat global material, while adding original content specifically produced for the region.

In December 2017, Ziff Davis bought the global Mashable operation for a “fire sale” price of US$50 million (A$70.7 million.) Ziff Davis then immediately shut down Mashable’s Asia base in Singapore, which had only three employees.

Vice Media launches in the Philippines

During the second day of IMMAP Digicon conference in the Philippines on October 4, Vice Media CEO Hosi Simon announced that Vice will launch in the Philippines next month. Natashya Gutierrez, a founding member of Philippines-based online news site Rappler where she worked for eight years, will join Vice as the Singapore-based head of content strategy for Asia Pacific.

SPH launches new digital photo marketplace

Singapore Press Holdings has launched Photonico, a new digital photo marketplace featuring Asian contemporary culture and heritage photography. SPH’s newly formed digital media product division helped create the entity, which aims to become the go-to place for high-quality stock images in Asia.

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Veteran Aussie TV cameraman booked

Aussie TV cameraman Leslie Seymour, just returned from the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh with Ray Martin, is riding high with the buzz for his recently released book My Best Shot: A Life Through the Lens, My Autobiography by Leslie Seymour. Aussie newsman Tom Krause praised the work in his blog, writing, “Unless you’re a veteran journo or a media junkie, you may not have heard about cameraman extraordinaire, Les Seymour. All he’s ever done as a camera operator and producer is work with journalists like Ray Martin , Richard Palfreyman, Paul Murphy, Ian Macintosh, Allan Hogan, Mark Colvin, Paul Lyneham, Paul Lockyer, Tony Joyce and Richard Carleton, and famous film people.”

The book is packed with stories and Asia Times editor Alan Parkhouse cites this yarn from the book: “When Les was based in London for the ABC, he hired a young guy to do sound with him.” Les writes how this young guy knew people in the music scene and helped get interviews with Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols, David Bowie and many others. “Eventually the young guy Les had been training to do sound resigned, saying he was going to give the music scene a go, and Les wished him the best of luck. A few months later Les was watching Top of the Pops and saw his former sound man, with dyed blonde hair, singing a song. The guy had changed his name to Billy Idol.”

Singapore radio station with Aussie content boss

The number one song voted in Singapore radio station One FM 91.3s Top Greatest Hits Of All poll was Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx, followed by Forever Young by Alphaville, It Must Have Been Love by Roxette, It’s My Life by Bon Jovi and I Just Called To Say I Love You by Stevie Wonder. Aussie pop duo Savage Garden came in at number seven with I Knew I Loved You, followed by Murray Head’s One Night In Bangkok.

ONE FM 91.3 and Kiss92 senior programming director James Meldrum – a former Australian radio personality who made his on-air debut at 4BC Brisbane at age four on Haydn Sargent’s talkback show – said, “The fans have spoken and these are the songs they love and want to hear.”

Hooq signs deal with Indian streamer Hotstar

Singapore-headquartered video on demand service Hooq has signed a partnership with Hotstar, India’s leading premium streaming platform. As part of the deal, Hooq’s 6,000-hour catalogue of Hollywood TV programming will be available to Hotstar Premium users, enabling Hooq to leverage Hotstar’s 150 million-plus monthly active users. Hooq CEO Peter Bithos said, “With the appetite for Hollywood content in India growing at a furious pace, we are poised to offer the Indian customer an easily accessible and very affordable way to watch the best of Hollywood. This partnership with Hotstar underscores our commitment to satisfying the Indian market’s appetite for on-demand content.”

Mediaweek Asia: In Brief

• Singapore’s Mediacorp has partnered with Discovery to launch Eurosport and Setanta Sports channels on Mediacorp’s digital entertainment subscription service, Toggle.
• Singapore Press Holdings has signed an agreement with The Agency for Science, Technology and Research’s Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) to create a system that optimises news headlines to improve audience engagement and media literacy. This system will enable SPH journalists to test different headlines for their articles, before choosing the one that would best attract a reader’s interest and attention.
• Ryoichi Ueda, president of Japan’s national public broadcaster NHK, has been elected as the new president of the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union. He will lead the ABU for the next three years from January 2019.
• Celestial Tiger Entertainment’s Asian pay-TV action entertainment channel KIX will premiere its original production Extreme Ends on Wednesday October 17. The series, produced in collaboration with the Hong Kong Tourism Board, follows four Southeast Asian celebrities and their guests exploring the diversity of Hong Kong. KIX is broadcast in Greater China and Southeast Asia.
• China’s Tencent Holdings will invest $317.6 million (A$450.2 million) in Chinese streaming site Bilibili for a 12.3% stake. Bilibili raised about $483 million in its US IPO in March this year at a valuation of more than $3 billion. Last month, Bilibili took a minority stake in Japan-based Fun-Media to expand its animation content.
• Hong Kong last week refused to renew the visa for the Foreign Correspondents’ Club’s vice president, Victor Mallet, the Asia news editor the Financial Times. A Financial Times spokesman told the Hong Kong Free Press that no reason had been given for the refusal.
• Thai-listed home shopping operator TV Direct TVD is introducing an expanded TV shopping/infotainment schedule next year in a directional shift for its newly acquired digital terrestrial service, Spring News Channel 19. TVD bought a 90% stake in the channel last month for THB949 million (A$41.7 million,) allocating a further THB131 million to Spring News for producing news content for TVD. The deal is expected to close by the end of this year.
• Tencent Holdings’ music unit, Tencent Music Entertainment Group, is filing for an IPO in the US, which could be the biggest US IPO by a Chinese company, as it seeks a valuation of about $25 billion, according to a Reuters report.
• More than 630,000 viewers have watched the first four episodes of MasterChef Singapore on Mediacorp Channel 5. The show has also had over 136,000 video views on Toggle. MasterChef Singapore premiered on September 2, and ends on October 21.

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Top Photo: Vice Phillipines

By Peter Olszewski

If you’re Tim Newton, you pack your bags and head for a tropical island like Phuket where you can eat cheap Thai food and hang up a shingle saying you’re in media business mode again, but fully embracing the digital world.

That was Newton’s move in 2012, and now, after some savvy moves, he’s heading Thaiger, which he launched basically as just an FM radio station in October 2016 when he and a friend bought the digital assets of the once print-heavy Phuket Gazette, which had shut up shop.

“They had run a weekly newspaper for 24 years,” Newton told Mediaweek. “They decided to pack it up, turn the lights out and go home. But they’d had nearly 20 years of website growth and had also kicked off YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The owner saw no value in those ‘digital’ bits. For me that was the only value left in the company.

“When The Thaiger bought the digital assets of Phuket Gazette in August 2017, we also took over the ongoing ‘story swap’ relationship that The Nation [national newspaper] and the Gazette had enjoyed before.

The Thaiger and The Nation still share stories. The Nation provides the foundation for our national story coverage.

In February this year Thaiger also collaborated with another online news service, Thai Visa, to further the TV news briefs Newton has also been doing.

“I’d tinkered with doing a daily TV news brief – about five minutes with a previous employer,” he said. “There was nothing else like it in Thailand at the time. I ended up doing about 700 episodes in total, the last 100 at The Thaiger in collaboration with Thai Visa, which was wanting to streamline a lot of its content and so outsourced its daily news to The Thaiger.

“At our peak the program was getting up to an average of 20,000 views a day. Once it reached about 60,000 views but, for a boutique news company, the leverage on meager resources was just too difficult to rationalise. We now do twice-weekly TV reports about various topical issues, which fit the flow of the ‘instant’ news cycle much better and are quicker to edit.”

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This is an excerpt from the full article, which appears on Mediaweek Premium. Read the full article here or subscribe to Mediaweek Premium here.

By James Manning

Seven

Home And Away drifted below 600,000 for the first time this week with 567,000 for three episodes.

Modern Family returned to the schedule in an early timeslot at 8.30pm with 241,000 and then 199,000 watching two episodes.

Nine

The fourth episode of the week of A Current Affair dipped just below 700,000. Reporter Chris Allen tracked down a convicted fraudster who was back in business.

It was then two hours of ob docs on Nine:

Driving Test 480,000

RBT 496,000

Paramedics 612,000

Keeping the medical theme after 9.30pm was Chicago Med with 244,000.

TEN

Kiwi comedian Rhys Darby was one of the best guests The Project has had for a long time. And they have some good guests. He was plugging his new book. And any episode with Rachel Corbett on the panel lifts a couple of notches too. The Thursday show did 443,000.

The second night of The Bachelorette did 539,000 after launching on 631,000. Despite the lower all-people numbers after last year, the show is connecting with some of its target audience. A Ten spokesperson said yesterday: “The Bachelorette Australia launch clearly struck a chord with the younger viewers with the show topping the 16-39 and 18-49 audience demos, and coming second in 25-54s. We also saw great engagement on social with the #BacheloretteAU hashtag trending #1 across Australia. Seven out of 10 trends last night were about The Bachelorette. Each of our Bachelorette leads have had their own unique story on their journey to find love and as Ali’s season goes on, she will surprise many.”

The final of The Bachelor from last week featured on Gogglebox and the families reflected the views of many on social media – they were surprised. Gogglebox did 677,000, down from 812,000 last week where it followed that dramatic Bachelor season final.

ABC

Grand Designs Australia did 506,000 after 8pm.

Sammy J then did 251,000 with QI on 220,000.

Wentworth then returned to the schedule with 86,000.

SBS

Tony Robinson and a drone are a simple recipe for a series, but Tony Robinson’s Hidden Britain By Drone is working a treat for SBS. After 289,000 last week the episode did 298,000 last night.

The first part of How “Mad” Are You? from Blackfella Films did 173,000.