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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

MediaApril 27, 2022

Netflix’s nightmare will chill streaming everywhere – including here

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

Streaming is looking like it might already have peaked. This should scare those tasked with building our shiny new public media entity, writes Duncan Greive.

The comparison will have stung. Netflix has for 20 years been viewed as an engine of innovation just this side of Apple, as the tech company that created subscription streaming, pioneered dropping whole seasons of shows at once and commissioned acclaimed original shows before others even had a product. Last week it was being widely compared to cable – the unloved, price-gouging linear TV distribution system it has spent its whole lifespan disrupting.

Why? Because, for the first time in a decade, it lost subscribers – just like cable has been doing for years now. The number involved is tiny, just 200,000 out of a global total of over 200 million, and if it hadn’t pulled out of Russia it might have eked out a positive result. But its share price has cratered, taking its market capitalisation to under US$100bn, or around a third of its level last November. As shares are a bet on the future prospects of a company, it was the market saying that it believed this was not a blip but a new reality – that the endless growth was over, and the company might already be far closer to its ceiling now than the 500 million or billion subs it envisaged.

The reasons Netflix has stalled are varied, and knowing exactly how much each contributed is impossible. Some of it is growth pulled forward as we locked down and became extremely online through the pandemic. There is now strong competition in streaming, after many years of Netflix being the only scale operator. The company itself blamed password sharing and inflation. The end of the pandemic has spawned an “attention recession”, as people leave the house and stop staring at their bright rectangles so much. The most hurtful critique is probably that it has lost its edge – that in trying to be all things to all people in all markets it has become no one’s favourite streamer, and therefore easier to cut.

Netflix

The bad times are not just here for Netflix

A month ago the cable news pioneer CNN launched its streaming service, CNN+, featuring the likes of NYU professor and podcaster Scott Galloway and ex-Fox News anchor Chris Wallace alongside an array of CNN stars doing some quite strange shows, like Jake Tapper’s Book Club. The launch was a huge deal for the network, and had a budget well into nine figures. It didn’t matter – the service has already been shut down by the network’s new owners, Discovery, which favoured one monster streaming service wrapping all its brands over selling a number of smaller boutique offerings. 

The abrupt end has further chilled the so-called streaming wars, which was one of the biggest stories in business a year or so ago, when worldwide entertainment brands like Disney and HBO began launching lavishly-funded new services aiming to take on Netflix. All have suffered major setbacks to their stock price, which collectively expresses a doubt from investors that the market will scale to be as big or profitable as once thought. There is also a fear that consumers will cycle on and off from subscriptions to catch the latest buzz show, meaning high marketing costs, while bidding for talent and shows will remain ferocious due to the number of players in the market. 

How does this impact New Zealand?

As of today the only scale global streamers available here are Disney and Netflix, though it seems inevitable that Three’s owners Discovery, newly merged with WarnerMedia (HBO, CNN and a host of reality shows) will arrive here soon. Beyond the two internationals the main local streaming services are Neon, a paid service owned by Sky TV, and TVNZ OnDemand, a free service supported by advertising. Neon currently has relatively long-running contracts to play movies and shows from multiple premium services outside New Zealand, and it remains to be seen whether it can retain those rights or if ultimately they will revert to their international owners and be sold direct to audiences.

A much more pressing concern is the fate of TVNZ OnDemand. It is the natural centrepiece of the forthcoming merger of RNZ and TVNZ – the biggest state-owned digital property and the most successful local streamer by far. Its last annual report boasted of 269m streams over the past year, and an impressive 40% increase in digital revenue (while declining to say exactly what percentage of its $343m in revenue came from digital advertising). 

It recently noted that streams have increased to 330m on a rolling annual basis, showing further strong growth. Still, it is worth assessing what that number means in different contexts. It’s around 66 streams per person – which, even if we generously assume every stream is completed, is little more than one episode streamed per week. Compared to the hours of linear television once consumed by the average New Zealander every single day, the drop-off in advertising inventory is precipitous – particularly when you consider that there are currently far fewer ads shown on streaming versus linear.

We are in the midst of a great behavioural migration from one set of legacy media (print newspapers and magazines, linear television, AM and FM radio) with a very limited number of providers to internet-delivered media, with infinite providers. And every time a consumer flips from relying on the old form to the new one they become far more fickle. For TVNZ and the incoming merged public media entity (can we please have a less clunky name?), this means a far lower income per user. Worse, every year we get a new cohort of 18-year-olds popping out of high school and starting a consumption journey – that is, becoming serious targets for the advertising that TVNZ relies on for income. And hardly any of them watch linear television.

The most difficult task for the new TVNZ-RNZ merger

The reason TVNZ and RNZ are merging is because everyone acknowledges that neither is doing all that well at reaching young people (to be fair, hardly any New Zealand media are, but the state has a moral obligation to fix that problem, whereas the private sector only has a business incentive). One recent data point showed just how difficult that job will be. 

In a survey by advertising giant Publicis first reported by the LA Times, “nearly half (48%) of video watched by Gen Z-ers [those aged 13-26] was made by content creators outside of the world of traditional entertainment professionals. Meanwhile, Gen X consumers’ viewing was 72% professionally produced.”

This is US research, but echoes NZ on Air’s Where Are The Audiences? Survey which shows online video as reaching four in five 15-39 year olds each day – but that NZ On Demand (largely TVNZ) reached just one in five. These results get amplified as audiences get younger, with On Demand video (dominated by YouTube) consumed by over 90% of 15-24 year olds, while NZ On Demand comes in at 19%. These numbers tend to grow more stark when you layer in other factors, like secondary languages or ethnicity.  

These compounding trends show the scale of the problem which sits in front of the newly appointed establishment board for this entity. Professionally made content is getting more and more expensive to make, and more tightly-held by massive international corporations. Consumers seem to be reaching their limit on the number of services they will use. And young people in particular curate their own idiosyncratic consumption habits and increasingly skew away from the kind of professionally produced news and entertainment content which big media companies like to make and distribute. Worse still, there was an extremely strong bias to local baked into the old model, whereas under the new reality it’s as easy to watch content from the US or Korea as it is from Aotearoa. That’s an extremely challenging bedrock which will never change.

To succeed might be impossible, but the best chance at it will require a willingness to meet audiences where they are, be very creative about how they interact with creator communities, measure everything and be ruthless about cutting what does not work. It will be very expensive, and require two entities which have historically liked to control every inch of what they create to cede some of that. 

It’s a very difficult (and inevitably expensive) task, and one which should have started in earnest a decade ago. But the current status quo, of funding skewing strongly toward the needs of older pākehā New Zealanders, is simply not sustainable – not least because even those consumers are abandoning linear at increasing rates. It all adds up to Netflix’s serious problems being ours too.


Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.


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Should we put the potato on a pedestal? Yes. Image: Toby Morris
Should we put the potato on a pedestal? Yes. Image: Toby Morris

MediaApril 22, 2022

New Zealand’s greatest novelty potato news stories, ranked

Should we put the potato on a pedestal? Yes. Image: Toby Morris
Should we put the potato on a pedestal? Yes. Image: Toby Morris

Warning – includes several freak potatoes. 

According to the “History of the potato” page on the Potatoes New Zealand website, “the potato’s story begins about 8,000 years ago near Lake Titicaca”, and while that story undulates its way through human cultural, political and culinary history, let us skip forward a bit to the humble root vegetable’s most important contribution: novelty news items. Here are 16 of the best local examples, ranked from pretty good to utterly transcendent.

16. Papakura potato spill, 2012

A good solid story combining two of the staples of contemporary life in New Zealand: traffic disruption and potato-based jokes. The Herald report on a truck releasing its load across a Papakura onramp began: “Drivers had to keep their eyes peeled yesterday morning after a trailer lost its load of spuds on the Southern Motorway.”

15. Freak potato, 1932

Just beneath a strip of photos from the vice-regal ball in Wellington, page 12 of the Timaru Herald on May 4, 1932, presented the frankly disgusting sight of a freak potato, with a human expression and curiously shaped ears. It’s really no wonder the grower was startled upon digging the abomination up. 

14. Camilla’s potato tornado, 2012

Is this a novelty potato story? Not really, no, but it is the Duchess Of Cornwall, aka Camilla, having a great time in Feilding with a potato spiral on a stick, and I thought you’d want to see it. 

‘Get a load of this massive potato spiral on a stick’ – Camilla, probably. (Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

13. Monster spud, 2015

Simply 1.5kg of pure potato gold (and green). Graham Reid is reported by the Southland Times as saying: “Someone told me I should put whiskers in it.”

Points off for failing to call it a freak potato.

12. Freak potato, 1936

Unusual and hideous, no thank you Mr Thomas. From the Christchurch Press. The answer to your question is 1.8kg.

11. Penis potato, 2019

On February 21, 2019, a man from Lower Hutt went digging in his garden and discovered what he recognised immediately as a “potato shaped like a penis … including testicles”. He auctioned it and, heartwarmingly, donated the proceeds to prostate cancer research. The potato (shaped like a penis) fetched $274.99

It was a bumper year for penis-shaped root vegetables on Trade Me. The penis potato was the year’s seventh most popular Trade Me post, with 57,312 views, but it couldn’t match a penis-shaped kūmara, which ranked fifth, clocking up 88,507 views. (The most viewed auction that year was a Bunnings hat purported to have been discarded by the unruly tourists.) (Editor’s note: for the purposes of this article the definition of “potato” does not extend to kūmara. We hope to properly explore novelty kūmara stories in a future edition of The Spinoff.)

The Lower Hutt man has a 100% feedback rating from 52 other Trade Me users. Recent comments on his engagements include “Fast and easy trade”; “Fantastic trader”; and “Good Trade Thankyou”.

10. Freak potato, 1934

In July, the Christchurch Press revealed to readers a “weird specimen”, in the form of a handsome duck-shaped potato. Alert to the perils of misinformation, the paper grilled the unnamed photographer, but, well, there’s something suspicious about the curvature, you know?

Regrettably the photographic reproduction lets down another avian potato, as paraded in a 1932 edition of the Waikato Independent:

9. The chipocalypse, 2017

The Irish suffered a devastating, nation-defining potato famine across seven years from 1845, with around a million people dying through starvation or disease. They called it “the bad times”. In New Zealand, heavy rainfall led to a bad crop in 2017, and we called it a “chipocalyspe” and “potatogeddon”.

The British had a lot to answer for in the Irish famine, and they were at it again in 2017, with imperial mouthpieces like the BBC and the Guardian mislabelling chips as “crisps”.

 

The New Zealand Herald reported Chris Claridge, chief executive of Potatoes New Zealand, as saying “while it is true that the crops have been wiped out by bad weather, there is no shortage looming”.

8 to 5. Freak potatoes, various

The freak potato photography genre is unquestionably glorious, but there is something special and evocative about the conjuring up of a freak potato from nothing but the written word. Case in point: this, which came directly after the cricket notes and before the Port of Oamaru tide tables in the Otago Daily Times of January 23, 1948. 

This from the Waikato Times of 1937 is strong, too:

And an honourable mention to this syntactically interesting example, from the Timaru Herald “news and notes” column, March 1935, republished here in full:

 As close readers of the freak potato content in this article (all of which are sourced via New Zealand’s best website, Papers Past) will note, almost all are from either side of the second world war, when pressures on space and the public mood presumably did not allow for such potato novelty. But there is one exception, in keeping with the war effort, from the Waikato Times, January 28, 1942, where it appeared alongside an editorial column assessing recent remarks by Joseph Stalin:

4. Freak potato, 1937 

When The Spinoff showed this Otago Daily Times photograph of a freak potato to The Spinoff creative director Toby Morris, Morris told The Spinoff: “Wow that potato bears a striking resemblance to a bird.”

3. Potato grenade, 2022

The most recent of the Aotearoa novelty potato stories is one of the best. “Trench fries,” quipped Stuff. “Grenade found on conveyor belt at hot chips factory.” A night shift worker at a South Auckland Mr Chips factory noticed that among the Matamata potatoes bound for the chipping conveyor belt was one that looked a lot like a hand grenade. This was no freak potato, however. It was an actual hand grenade. And so it was that the bomb squad was called to the chips factory. 

Left: the hand grenade. Right: the Mr Chips operations manager demonstrates for Stuff the interrogation of a regular potato.

The potato-impersonating grenade was later confirmed to be a training version of a “Mills bomb”, probably used in the 1940s by the home guard. The Mr Chips operations manager told Stuff he had taken a photo of the grenade and laminated posters for staff. He said: “It made for a more interesting night than we normally have.”

2. Freak potato, 1933

It’s not even all that freaky a potato, but the ornamentation adds such character, such charm, such menace. This is the best and truest FP, the kind of FP you want to spend time with, even in the knowledge that it might ritually disembowel you as you sleep. Thank you West Coast resident. Thank you Christchurch Star.

1. Dug the potato, 2021

Unless you’ve been buried deep in moist and fertile soil for the last few years you know this, the greatest novelty potato story in the history of our nation, the 7.9kg planet extracted from a backyard in Ngāhinapōuri. Astonished, immobilised, the world stared as one at the potato called Dug, like Camilla did in Feilding at her humongous helter skelter on a stick. We gasped at this starchy feline facsimile of Rodin’s Le Penseur, cooed at the sight of it getting towed around in a little cart, cheered at its presumptive status as the world’s biggest potato.

You’ll know, too, how that big potato title was cruelly torn from Dug and Dug’s parents, Colin and Donna. In March of this year the Guinness World Records’ buzz-evisceration department announced that so-called scientists had declared Dug to be a “a type of gourd”, rather than a potato.

They say they studied Dug’s “DNA”, whatever that is. We say: this is just like the time the Welsh tried to claim some tarmac lump in Gwynedd was steeper than Dunedin’s mighty Baldwin Street. In time that travesty was reversed, and so it will be, we predict, with Dug. After all, if Dug is not a potato, how could Dug top a list of New Zealand’s greatest novelty potato stories?


For weekly coverage of novelty news stories (potato and otherwise) follow The Real Pod on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.


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