Business of Media
The all-star cast for Lachlan Murdoch’s legal drama falls into place
If Lachlan Murdoch is going to prevail in his defamation battle against small left-wing publisher Crikey, the News Corporation co-chairman will have to make his case to a judge who was previously the subject of an apprehended bias complaint by one of his own Australian newspapers, reports Nine Publishing’s Mark Di Stefano.
Justice Michael Wigney has been assigned to hear the case of Murdoch against Private Media, the publisher of Crikey. In 2019 he found News Corporation-owned The Daily Telegraph had defamed actor Geoffrey Rush.
During an appeal against Justice Wigney’s decision to award Rush $2.9 million in damages, The Daily Telegraph’s legal team argued the judge’s “tone” had given rise to an apprehension of bias in the case. The argument was later dropped and the judgment upheld.
But Justice Wigney will now decide the blockbuster matter of Lachlan Keith Murdoch v Private Media Ltd before the Federal Court in Sydney.
ABC director’s alleged conflict of interest under scrutiny
The federal government is reviewing whether an ABC board director needs to step down from the position after the national broadcaster took its concerns about an alleged conflict of interest to Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, reports Nine Publishing’s Zoe Samios.
Fiona Balfour, a former chief information officer at Qantas and Telstra, joined the ABC board last May with former News Corp and Foxtel boss Peter Tonagh, and former Seven executive and Australia Post board member Mario D’Orazio. She is facing calls to resign over a potential conflict of interest that is linked to her recent appointment on the board of Telstra subsidiary, Digicel.
Telstra is a major supplier of mobile technology and other services to the ABC, which this masthead reported last week was the reason some board members believe the appointment is a conflict of interest. Others on the ABC board disagree.
Netflix with ads is coming this year. Here’s what we know
Global streaming giant Netflix is planning to make its new advertising tier available in Australia before the end of the year in a clear sign of its ambitions to boost revenue as subscriber numbers dwindle, reports Nine Publishing’s Zoe Samios.
Local media sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorised to speak publicly, said the streaming giant had begun discussions with local advertisers about plans to roll out the ads, which will be unskippable and appear before an episode or film starts.
The service is expected to cost about $8, which is less than the price of a basic Netflix streaming subscription. Subscribers paying full price won’t have to view ads. Sources said Netflix is also considering running ads in the middle of a program under the new service.
A Netflix spokesperson said the company was still making decisions on how to launch. “We are still in the early days of deciding how to launch a lower priced, ad-supported option and no decisions have been made. This is all just speculation at this point,” the spokesperson said.
See Also: Why an ad-supported Netflix tier would be “Nirvana for advertisers”
Podcasts
The Dawson case was a win for true crime, but the outlook is gloomy for ‘podcast justice’
In the hugely popular but often maligned world of true crime, the conviction this week of former Sydney teacher Chris Dawson for the murder of his wife Lynette was a big win for podcast justice, reports the ABC’s David Lipson.
The blockbuster genre has left a litany of complaints and complications in its wake, sometimes delaying actual justice, occasionally denying it completely.
But in the case of The Teacher’s Pet podcast, which shone the brightest of lights on the decades-old unsolved case, with 60 million downloads worldwide, police got their man.
Whether that was despite or because of the podcast depends on who you ask.
Television
Amazon delays The Rings of Power ratings to combat fake reviews
Amazon has started delaying user reviews posted to its video-streaming service by up to three days to tackle fake ratings, reports The Guardian’s Alex Hern.
The move is an effort to tackle a spree of “review bombings” driven, in part, by an “anti-woke” backlash to the diverse casting in the company’s Lord of the Rings prequel series, The Rings of Power, which features non-white actors cast as elves and dwarfs.
On review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, the show has an 84% average rating from critics, but a 38% average audience score. Even on IMDb, the film and TV site owned by Amazon, the show has attracted 17,500 one-star ratings, 25% of the reviews for the title, although many of them have been disregarded by the site’s “weighted average” ratings, which attempt to downrate “unusual voting activity”.
TV content quotas send kids to streaming services
Scrapping content quotas on free-to-air television has dramatically accelerated the shift in children’s viewing towards online streaming platforms, as Australian commercial networks continue to slash the number of shows pitched at the under-12 demographic, reports News Corp’s Sam King.
After quotas for locally produced children’s TV content were removed in 2020, the amount of first release Australian children’s programs broadcast on commercial free-to-air channels fell by more than half.
Nine showed 47 hours of new Australian children’s TV in 2021, 10 showed 40 hours and Seven showed only 6½.
Conversely, children’s content on subscription video on demand services soared, with the Australian Children’s Television Foundation’s latest annual report showing the 10 most popular children’s “channels” in the past year were almost exclusively streaming services.
Breakfast TV loses tens of thousands of viewers in three years
It’s a real life case of Morning Wars as shows across all networks wonder where hundreds of thousands of breakfast TV viewers have gone, reports News Corp’s Briana Domjen.
In November of 2019, Sunrise, Today and ABC News Breakfast pulled a collective audience of 672,000.
Just three years later, that’s down to 498,000 – a loss of 174,000 viewers.
In fact, in December of 2020, Sunrise had an average 448,000 viewers nationally – a figure which is now just short of total viewers for all networks combined.
The Challenge Australia cast announced: Bachelorette stars make the cut
A motley crew of former reality stars, influencers and athletes will compete in the first ever season of The Challenge, report News Corp’s Jonathon Moran and Mikaela Wilkes.
Confidential’s take on the show is that it is a mix of Married At First Sight, Survivor, Big Brother and Bachelor In Paradise.
There has been much speculation on the identity of the cast, mostly around the inclusion of Bachelorette contestant Konrad Bien-Stephen and his hook up with Megan Marx that led to the break-up of his relationship to The Masked Singer judge Abbie Chatfield.
Confidential can confirm Bien-Stephen is in the cast, as is Marx, who appeared on season four of The Bachelor and the first series of Bachelor In Paradise.
But there’s plenty more names that will provide gossip fodder.
‘True, apart from the made-up bits’: why people are lining up to sue over Netflix portrayals
A lot of fun can be had messing about with the familiar disclaimer that pops up on the screen before a television drama or film begins, reports The Guardian’s Vanessa Thorpe.
One impish recent line, displayed at the start of each episode of Inventing Anna, the Netflix show about Anna Sorokin (also known as Anna Delvey), the fake heiress, reads: “This whole story is completely true. Except for the parts that are completely made up.”
It is a trick that is by now almost a cinematic cliche, with notable examples including the words that open the apocalyptic 1964 comedy, Dr Strangelove. “It is the stated position of the United States Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film,” director Stanley Kubrick’s audience is informed.
Yet even a heavily fictionalised, improbable story can be judged to have impugned real people. And when some of those improbable events really did take place, then litigation is a growing risk.
Sports Media
AFL set to renew broadcast deal with Foxtel, Seven
Foxtel and Seven are set to be renewed as co-broadcasters of the AFL, with the streaming-led sports and entertainment platform and the free-to-air network remaining the preferred partners of the sport’s governing body, despite last-minute overtures from rival bidders, reports News Corp’s James Madden.
The long running saga over the battle for the AFL’s broadcast rights – the most lucrative television sports deal in Australia – is likely to be resolved in coming days, with a new five or six year deal to be formalised before Friday’s semi-final between the Melbourne Demons and the Brisbane Lions.
The existing broadcast deal still has another two years to run, meaning the next contract won’t come into effect until the beginning of the 2025 season.