Old TV viewing patterns show up online 

Nine’s Pedestrian Group is convinced it can pull a big crowd on TikTok. Now it wants to do the same on 9Now, last night launching the platform’s first “FAST” Channel, Pedestrian Television, a throwback to curated linear TV feeds which should by now be buried but are booming around the world because of the “paralysis of choice” on streaming platforms, even for the younger set.

News Corp is cutting a similar path into social networks with vertical video – 75 per cent of its content consumption is now on a mobile device where vertical video reins supreme. The publisher has clocked 4 billion video starts in the past year, largely via social channels with short-form snackable content and is now bringing those experiments back to its own audience network with the hope some of the social media set will follow.

“Brands and advertisers should care about this,” said Paul Blackburn, Director for Commercial Data, Video and Product at News Corp. “It’s open web, we’re not at the whims of an Apple or the app environment where measurement and attribution has become very challenged…we have the data capability to protect brands from content areas where the brand doesn’t want to be.” 

FAST TV channels boom

Last night Nine’s younger-skewing media unit, Pedestrian Group, which pulls circa 4 million users each month to its portfolio of websites like PedestrianTV, Vice, Refinery29 and The Chainsaw,  launched Pedestrian Television, a free ad-supported TV – or FAST – channel designed to slipstream Love Island’s romp with the younger set as a video on demand show on 9Now.

But Pedestrian Television is an entire channel of short-form curated content rather than a single show and it’s this throwback to what was supposed to be old-world curated linear TV feeds that is booming the world over, despite the rise of subscription video services. 

At the Mi3-Futue of TV Advertising Forum in April, Vanity VIP Intelligence boss, Gavin Bridge, said FAST channels in Australia would top $300m in ad revenues within four years although this market was well behind the international trend. In the US there were already upwards of 1600 FAST channels operating and would hit $10bn in ad revenues by 2027. They are largely curated channels of recycled TV series like The Office, Law & Order and The Walking Dead or genres such as Sci-fi or lifestyle. 

In Australia, SamsungTV has nearly 100 FAST channels operating on its platform, Telstra’s Fetch about 10, Paramount-Ten has more than a dozen (it’s Pluto service has 78m US subscribers) and Seven has upwards of 50 FAST channels. 

Last and not FAST
Nine, however, only made its first move into FAST last night with Pedestrian Television but Pedestrian Group CEO Matt Rowley told Mi3  the format and content was so different it was reluctant to put it in the FAST bucket. 

“We don’t really talk about Pedestrian Television being a FAST channel,” he said. “The reason is part of that craziness that you’re seeing in the proliferation of FAST channels is that people are basically taking back catalogues of content and dumping it into FAST. That’s what Pedestrian Television isn’t. It’s a carefully curated array of awesome content that we’ve scoured the world and internet for as well as our content we make every day. From a programming perspective, it’s more like a good old fashioned TV channel that’s aimed at 18-35 year-olds talking to them with an Australia voice rather than a soul-less dumping ground for back catalogue content.”

Still, the trigger for launching Pedestrian Television is the same – viewer choice paralysis with video on demand (VOD).

Streaming choice paralysis

“Everyone’s seen it - you sit on the sofa at night, you've got all this choice of endless content to watch and you spend an eternity trying to figure out what the hell to watch,” said Rowley. “We call it TV decision paralysis and we think this just solves that for young people. There's always going to be something there that's really interesting and it plugs me into what's going on in Australia - in the city I'm in that day, that week, that weekend, which you can't rely on, for example, on social media because you don't know what's true.”

Pedestrian Television's service has embedded new tech which allows content to be carved up into more short-form style social media formats versus the longer episodic approach of most FAST channels heavy with back-catalogue TV shows.

This broader viewer return to linear-like TV viewing behaviour online was also showing up in the surge of viewing to live streaming shows on 9Now content, similar to free-to-air viewing, rather than on-demand self-selection. 

Live streaming, big screen – not mobile, on-demand

“There’s just been an astronomic rise in the live streaming side of the 9Now product,” said Lewis Evans, Nine’s Product Director of Streaming for TV and Radio. “Where you might think younger audiences are more used to that Netflix, Stan, Foxtel video-on-demand consumption pattern, they’re actually equally, and in some cases, more likely to be going to that live side of our experience, whether that’s to watch Love island, The Block and particularly around live news and live sport. That pattern transcends age group.”   

Other old-school TV behaviours are also proving hard to break. Evans said perceptions that 9Now viewing was primarily on mobile or apps were wrong. “Close to 80 per cent of all our consumption on 9Now is on a big screen [connected TV] and over half is now live streamed viewing. It’s traditional viewing behaviour over the internet.”

So can Pedestrian Television lure the attention deficit set from their social flicks and scrolls?

“Yeah, well that’s going to be the challenge,” said Evans. “This is going to tie in really nicely with the Love Island Australia season, which is coming up next month and skews massively to a younger audience and it’s just off the back of The Block finale. We’re able to leverage the promotional real estate off the publishing and social media presence Pedestrian has to bring a totally different audience through to the 9Now proposition.”