Nine months into Think TV, we ask chairman Glen Kyne to reflect on what New Zealand’s first television collective has achieved in the last year and what we can look forward to in 2019.
News, sports and Hyundai Country Calendar remain at the top of New Zealanders’ television viewing schedules – but the Royal Wedding in May wasn’t far behind.
Design and craft based television show – Design Junkies – has been allocated it’s second lot of funding from TVNZ. The spend comes following a successful first series – produced by Warner Bros. NZ – which sees a diverse bunch of designers upcycle junk into coffee tables, photoshoot props, and various other installations. In light of the release, the show is currently on the hunt for the crop of next designers, makers and artists to feature on the next edition.
The head of News and Current Affairs at Māori Television has resigned, but the network says it has nothing to do with the proposed restructure.
As online streaming services slowly replace broadcast television as the preferred way to watch TV, the ways in which content is developed are also changing. Streaming services are boasting ‘original’ content, with the banner, ‘Netflix Original’, becoming synonymous with edgy or ground-breaking content, created free from the bounds of traditional broadcast media. Now, slowly but surely, Lightbox is getting in the game.
Church Road Winery travels the country in a new series on TVNZ OnDemand – the first work by Raydar and 99 for Pernod Ricard since winning the account from Ogilvy late last year.
Despite the ubiquitous nature of digital communications and millennials spreading their time across a range of screens, television remains a hugely valuable platform for delivering emotive content with the scale, impact and the effective frequency required to create meaningful business impact.
The New Zealand Television Awards recognised excellence in local television programmes as well as individual achievement as it announced the 2017 winners last night at Auckland’s SkyCity Theatre.
The suspense is over as we run down the results of our 2017 Hot List where we direct our attention now to the best of the best from the silver screen.
Renovation enthusiasts rejoice as MediaWorks launches the sixth season of The Block NZ with another colourful campaign.
Sky has extended its offering to its Sky Sport customers, with a Sport Highlights app that allows them to keep up to date with the best of their favourite sport without tuning into the games.
Like Adele, Lorde’s cryptic TV teaser was minimalist marketing at its finest, and all she really had to do was eat food in a car.
Media experts have expressed frustration at the fact that Broadcasting minister Amy Adams will keep restrictions on advertising over Easter Weekend in place under the proposed Digital Convergence Bill.
Spark’s decision to narrow in on sport streaming rights in its opposition of the Sky/Vodafone merger was an interesting move, given that the telco no longer offers sport content as part of its SVOD offering. We look at why so much hinges on sport content.
The MediaWorks board has announced the resignation of Mark Weldon from his position as chief executive.
Over the last two years, TVNZ has invested significantly in large-scale campaigns to keep Shortland Street fans engaged with the show during the summer hiatus. And as was the case last year, the strategy has paid off with the latest campaign resulting in over 410,000 interactions. PLUS: Shortland Street fan dresses in black to mourn the passing of Dr Wendy Cooper.
Nielsen has confirmed to StopPress that it will no longer be fielding specific enquiries from journalists on the audience metrics of New Zealand television shows. Instead, the research company will provide a weekly top 20 breakdown of programmes for One, TV2, TV3, Four, Prime and Sky in the 5+ and 25-54 demographics.
Roy Morgan has revealed that Kiwi media habits in the morning are shifting online, with a recent study showing that the proportion of New Zealanders accessing online media channels has surpassed those reading the newspaper or watching television. However, radio still remains comfortably at the top of the pile in terms of the preferred media channel, with 40.2 percent of Kiwis still tuning into the airwaves every day.
Cantabrians Brooke and Mitch took out the latest edition of the Block NZ Villa Wars selling their renovated property for $1,350,000 netting them a windfall of $290,000 but the big winners for The Block NZ Villa Wars were MediaWorks, which returned very high rating numbers for the Sunday evening finale.
A strong creative period across the industry sees Rebel Sport, Jaguar, Daikin, the Earthquake Commission and Skinny share a crowded podium this week.
Far gone are the days where we got to the best point in our television show only to hear “cccsssshhhh” and see our screens produce an unnerving display of black and white fuzz as we frantically wrestled our bunny ear aerials into the most awkward and weird positions to get the picture back (only to have missed the best part). Luckily this hasn’t been a problem for a while, and our options for viewing television are always getting better, and today Freeview announced the launch of its new digital TV platform, FreeviewPlus, which allows Kiwis with the right technology to access on-demand video on new smart televisions.
Television has had quite the facelift over the past few years. Reality television has taken over the episodic drama, with its cheap production cost and malleable format, which viewers can easily tune into without any kind of backstory. What else is changing is our current affairs shows, the days of the solo renegade hosting style of John Campbell and Paul Holmes seems to be over as a softer format with multiple hosts is nudging its way in. With all these changes we thought we’d do a bit of an overview of the top shows on telly to see how they’re performing amongst this difficult and ever-changing media climate.
“When the copyright owners are posting videos of Taylor Swift [to YouTube] before giving them to us to play it leads us to question why we exist,” says Flame Tree Media founder and director Dan Wrightson. And for this reason he’s decided to change direction of the channel after 21 years.
Channel Four in the UK has a fairly impressive in-house creative team, as evidenced by its magnificent Paralympics campaign from a few years back. And now, to launch its new ondemand platform All4, it’s peered 100 years into the future and predicted a same sex royal wedding, robotic horse racing and a series of mutant hosts.
For those of you who have longed to put yourselves in the shoes of a criminal defence lawyer, now you can, in the digital world at least. TV2 has launched a new campaign in the form of an online game to promote its show How to Get Away with Murder, through the release of a murder mystery game that casts the player as part of a criminal defence team fighting to clear a client’s name.
After a series of technical glitches pushed back the date from December last year, Neon is set to launch on Friday, 13 February. And, not to be outdone by news of its competitor’s arrival, Lightbox has sent out a release to various media publications in which it gloats about the strong results of Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul.
From March, Prime News, which airs on Sky-owned Prime, will be produced by the MediaWorks news division at their Auckland Flower Street Studios as part of a new deal between the two networks. And the deal comes with additional revenue potential for MediaWorks, because the network will also be selling advertising and sponsorship associated with the show. PLUS: Top Gear heads to TV3.
At Auckland Airport on Friday night, something slightly interesting—albeit not altogether unexpected—happened. The Kiwis enjoying a last-minute meal at the Bach Alehouse asked the waiting staff to turn up the volume of the television, not for a sporting or international news event, but for a reality TV show. Despite now being three seasons deep, Kiwis had clearly not tired of The Block NZ and they still wanted to see the action unfold during the finale, which saw Alex and Corban Walls walk away with $307,000. And the popularity of the show wasn’t limited to a holiday house-themed pub at the airport on Friday night.
Sky had a stunner last Friday when it announced great numbers, a new five year rugby deal and plans for some fancy new additions to its boxes. It also announced the launch of its much-discussed SVOD offering Neon, which is set to launch in December. Here’s what managing director Dave Joyce had to say about the strategy behind it.
Following on from last year’s elaborate faux real estate campaign for Agent Anna’s first season, TVNZ’s in-house agency Blacksand has again tapped into the fake reality theme for the promotion of the dramedy’s second season. Shot in an actual rental home, the stunt features Robyn Malcolm in character as klutzy Anna Kingston showing real visitors—and potential tenants—around a home, which has been set up with a variety of booby traps that result in some awkward interactions.