There’s no shame at News Corp Australia. Its propaganda outlets complain about the evils of inflation and Labor’s economic mismanagement, while its various arms — Foxtel and REA Group — gouge consumers for millions of dollars extra a year in higher charges.
Indeed, recent price rises from Foxtel and REA are good examples of exactly the kind of “sticky inflation” that worries the Reserve Bank so much. REA Group, 61% owned by News Corp and a major profit earner for the company, managed to raise prices by 13% for home buyers using its listings service and 8% for renters. This is what REA said in its half-year financial report to the ASX yesterday:
Australian residential revenue increased 19% to $505.5 million with a 19% increase in buy yield and 4% increase in national listings. Buy yield benefited from a 13% average national price rise, increased Premiere+ and total depth penetration, and a 3% positive impact from geographical mix due to outperformance of the higher yielding Sydney and Melbourne markets. Rent revenue increased with an 8% average price rise and growth in depth penetration, partly offset by a 2% decline in listings.
The 13% rise was three times the CPI of 4.1% in the December quarter and the 8% rise for renters was twice the CPI. And they fed into housing costs, a key area of continuing inflationary concern for the RBA.
Foxtel — 65% owned by News Corp — also got in on the act in the December quarter:
Revenues of $470 million in the quarter increased $8 million, or 2%, compared with the prior year, driven by higher revenues from Kayo and BINGE from increases in both volume and pricing, despite a more difficult Summer sports season and inflationary pressures.
“Pricing” is such an anodyne word without any attendant numbers. Foxtel’s main growth businesses now are BINGE and Kayo. Together they make up more than half of Foxtel’s (reduced) total subscribers of 4.317 million, down from 4.650 million paid at June 30 last year. Foxtel last year lifted the cost of BINGE by $2 a month to $18 a month — an increase of 12.5%, which is three times the rate of consumer price inflation. But the increase is bigger if you go back to 2022, when the price was lifted from $14 to $16 a month. That means that from mid-2022 to October last year, Foxtel has lifted the price by 28.5%.
Kayo is an even more egregious example of price gouging. It is lifting the cost of its basic stream to $A35 a month from $30 from February 14 (Happy Valentine’s Day to subscribers!). That price rise comes just before the big attractions of the year, the winter AFL and NRL competitions.
There are plenty of victims of this gouging. At December 31 last year, News Corp said Binge had 1.471 million paying customers, and Kayo had 1.173 million.
Foxtel is also engaging in shrinkflation: it is limiting the number of streams existing Kayo Premium subscribers can have from three to two and migrating them to the Basic offering of $35 a month (which they are paying anyway). That means a shift from three streams at nearly $12 each to two streams at $17.50 each, which is an effective price rise of almost 50%.
All up that’s more than $105 million a year in extra revenue for Foxtel and News Corp, its controlling shareholder which wants to float Foxtel on the ASX if it can this year.
The cost of Foxtel Plus is also going up more than 30% to $70 a month; movies are going up 32% to $95. No wonder Foxtel residential subscriber numbers fell more than 100,000 in the 18 months from the end of 2021-22 financial year to the end of December.
Foxtel’s not alone — Disney lifted the price of its Disney+ stream for Australian users by 30% from next month. But you don’t get Disney banging on about the cost of living and how someone should do something about it…
Wow, that’s so unlike News Corp to be hypocritical!
The development of streaming services is a wonder to behold. Once upon a time there was Netflix and not much else, a subscription was easily affordable, its coverage of film and TV was vast, and there were no advertisements. Now the number of services is getting difficult to count and one might naively imagine that all this competition must drive down prices. But not at all; each service has its exclusive content and each keeps raising its prices mercilessly, while in many cases stuffing its offerings with advertising too.
Real competition, it seems, would only be from DVD and BluRay, but this is getting killed off by the refusal to release new films and TV in those formats.
Check out the definition of enshittification.
Check out the definition of ensh!ttification.
There is another type of competition. You can ignore the whole circus and just watch free to air or read a book or something. Maybe some gardening or some other hobby.
Streaming is not the be all and end all of human existance.
Don’t worry, I pay for exactly zero streaming services.
Free to air! Lol.
SBS was destroyed by ads ages ago, ABC is a disheartening bin fire, and the commercial channels are… commercial channels.
There is a good deal of truth in that statement- the SBS ads every 15 minutes are excessive, and of course ABC programs are variable and some very similar to the commercial version ( eg Grand Designs Transformations) . Commercial TV is truly awful but remember that’s what most people watch. To the average punter the language, the loud schtick is just normal; the ads are constantly pushing a glamorous, unrealistic lifestyle to so many gullible people, often sub consciously. It is insidious. So as Michael Smith suggests, do something else, be selective and limit how much TV you watch!
Completely agree that finding other things to do than sucking up screen content should be the first consideration. But if you’re still going to watch free-to-air, there is a way to filter out the commercials. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being subjected to the full force of the brain-liquifying advertising assault.
Record the free-to-air TV that interests you, in a standard file format (not the proprietary encrypted format that comes with some ‘smart’ TVs), and then process the recording using software that strips out the commercials, before watching the programme. A web search will find detailed advice on how it’s done. There will still be all those infuriating little banners that run out onto corners of the screen all through every programme, and various other annoyances that the broadcasters use to ruin the experience of their viewers, but it’s still way better than the raw unfiltered TV experience, that these days is more like watching torrents of commercials that are occasionally interrupted by bits of programmes.
Try ABC and SBS online. At a pinch, rent a single movie from Youtube. No contracts!
Put out the bin. The be all and end all of human existance is landfill. In a thousand years it’s all we’ll be known by. “Look what they threw away! My God they must have been rich!”
I do believe that many streaming customers arrrrrrrr returning to their previous ways.
“All hypocrites are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Back to torrents. The proliferation of streaming platforms has already initiated a revival of the scene. If only the VPN I pay for would actually work.
I use a Swiss VPN service that also offers free fully encrypted emails, and cloud calendar. NZBs are also interesting, said to be a safer, and more efficient alternative to torrents for legally sharing user generated content.
I have gone from subscribing from all of Netflix, Amazon, Stan, Binge, Hulu, Youtube, Disney, and Spotify, to subscribing to none of them.
I’m no sports fan, but isn’t Kayo still really good value compared with the previous alternative (Foxtel subscription with the sports package) ?