The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has given the green light for Foxtel and Seven West Media to get into bed together in a joint subscription video-on-demand joint venture.
Seven Media will now buy shares in Presto Entertainment.
The Australian whose parent News Corporation own 50% of Foxtel said that the ACCC considered whether the combined involvement of pay-tv operator Foxtel and the top-rating network Seven, would give the Presto service an advantage over its SVOD competitors, and whether it would reduce competition in the sector.
It found that there was a wide range of content available to SVOD providers and the joint venture was “unlikely to have a significant competitive advantage in obtaining access to compelling content”.
The move could see both organisations mount a multimillion dollar marketing campaign to take on Netflix. New numbers suggest that over 40,000 Australians used a VPN to download series three of the House Of Cards series which is produced by Netflix.
Foxtel has already launched Presto Movies and Presto Entertainment, its television and movies SVOD service.
“The ACCC determined that, following the proposed acquisition, the Presto Entertainment service would continue to face strong competition from other SVOD services such as Stan (a joint venture between Nine and Fairfax) and Netflix, which has announced it will launch in Australia this month,” ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said in a statement.
Foxtel who appear to be more interested in promoting streaming than their set top box service have not explained why they have not upgraded their iQ set top box that restricts the amount of programs you can record, has a poor UI interface and does not allow consumers to attach an additional storage device to record more than 500Gb of content.
18 months Foxtel ago said that they were close to launching a new set top box. SmartHouse understands that the box that was planned is now obsolete and too costly to launch. We have also been told that Fetch TV who are currently attracting hundreds of new customers via Optus will in the second half launch a set top box that is capable of recording over 10 programs at once.
