After announcing their purchase of Network 10 last year, CBS Corporation, has announced to investors overnight that Australians will get access to CBS’s Streaming Video On Demand (SVOD) service All Access by years end.
The news that CBS All Access will expand to the Australian market comes on the heels of their announcement this week that the platform has launched in Canada. Australia will be yet another market being added in the companies quest to provide their content to more than 8 million subscribers globally by 2020.
In a call to investors on the back of the release of their Q1 Financial Results, CBS Corporation chief executive Leslie Moonves said
“By year’s end, we plan to bring All Access to Australia using our acquisition of Network TEN as a gateway to launch in that market,” he said. “After that, we’ll add more and more markets every year, leading to tremendous upside to our overall direct-to-consumer strategy. And importantly, these international subs are incremental to our 2020 target that I just mentioned.”
It’s unclear what titles will be available through the CBS All Access Platform with local streaming rights for some of their original programming, including shows such as Star Trek Discovery and The Good Fight, already awarded to Netflix and SBS respectively. CBS All Access is expected to begin reigning in rights for their content as distribution contracts expire in order to move fans of the shows to their own platform.
There was no official date given for the launch here locally of CBS All Access but if it does launch by years end here, it would certainly be a very early and welcome Christmas present.
What are your thoughts on the news CBS All Access will launch by the end of the year? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Kiss Star trek Discovery goodbye from Netflix then. I suspect this will be like Amazon video crippled because of previous rights holder agreements.
This part of the evolution was always on the cards. First you get catchup TV, moving from time based delivery to user centric – mainly because the execs don’t realise what’s happening. Then you get the VoD services, packaging up old content in a usable form; which begats original content production and a global focus for the VoD services. Where we are now is the TV execs waking up to where things are going and thinking they can get a piece of the pie for themselves – a bit of old content, a bit of new, a $10pm price tag… Read more »
Yeah but I was sort of hoping CBS All Access would be one of the chaff that gets winnowed. It’s already pretty certain there will be three core global services – Netflix, Amazon, Disney – and maybe a fourth, Apple, if they don’t get bored with their little hobby. If CBS AA makes it, that will be five. Too damn many. Why can’t they stop at three? It’s up to consumers to refuse to subscribe to all these services and help the winnowing process. But yeah people do subscribe to multiple services. In America, there’s been research indicating the average… Read more »
We have Foxtel, Netflix and Stan. It gets to a point of costs outweighing the benefit. If there was a single subscription service that combined all of the platforms into a single service, that would be a preferable deal. The only problem is that none of the services want to play nice with each other and keep the consumer happy.
The more each individual rights holder looks to quarantine their own content, the less appealing the end product becomes and the lower the value. Disney will likely find the same problem when they launch their own content distribution. As consumers, instead of two or three companies covering (nearly) everything at $13-15 each per month, we will end up with 6+ competing options, with no overlap in content, with each one looking for the same monthly return. I can see a lot of people switching services every few months, binge watching whatever that service offers, then moving to the next one.… Read more »
No, actually exclusive content is a very good strategy for attracting customers. Netflix is doing it and they’re up to 125 million subscribers. Fortunately there’s a high cutoff tolerance for how many services can make it. 4 or 5 maybe – all big global players. It will be wildly profitable for those big players. A few people will jump around but people are lazy critters. Most will forget to cancel and just stick with whatever services they started out with.
I think we are violently agreeing. Exclusive content is definitely how companies attract customers, but a widely disaggregated media market with few (or no) overlaps in content only benefits the media suppliers, because it becomes increasingly expensive to access what was previously available from one or two suppliers. Consumers will either have to a) sign up to all of them, b) stick with one or two and accept they will miss out on anything they want to see on the other services (or resort to illegal downloading again), or c) jump between services. Regardless, it’ll be interesting to see how… Read more »
Not going to happen. They will just push people back to torrenting.
It all comes down to content, if it is limited like our version of Netflix then it’s not enough.
Their problem is they try and charge a subscription for what is filler material and american sports. Somehow I don’t see a lot of takeup at $13 pm. Hell, I wouldn’t see much interest even if it were free.