Exclusive Interview: Foxtel’s Ross Crowley

PREMIUM: Ross Crowley, Foxtel’s director of programming and channels, explains the increasingly competitive Australian pay-TV landscape and the company’s ongoing commitment to investing in quality programming.

WS: What have you learned about how your subscribers are watching content? Tell us about the Express from the U.S. offering, which aims to close the gap between the U.S. premiere date of a show and its launch in Australia.
CROWLEY: We launched Express from the U.S. about three years ago. We decided we were going to deliver an episode of a show as it [arrived via satellite] and people could either watch it right away or wait until evening when we would run it on one of our channels. What we’ve established is that people record it immediately straight off the satellite and watch it as soon as they can. It might arrive at 1 p.m. and they’ll watch it at 4:30 p.m. or 5 p.m. instead of waiting till later. We’ve given them an enormous amount of flexibility and up to half of the shows are viewed on that as-soon-as basis. Like the rest of us, I record the shows I want as they arrive and watch them when I get home. Even though we have great commercial partners, we are a subscription business and part of that is delivering what our subscribers want.

WS: What innovations is Foxtel offering its subscribers?
CROWLEY: Foxtel Go, which is available online, on tablets and mobile phones, is up and running and we are in the process of making it available to the new game platforms. The iQ3, which is our third-generation digital box, has features like live trending—you can literally see what is hot in the nation at any given moment. And it changes during the course of the day, so in the middle of the afternoon you’ll see certain children’s programs are hot. Or if there is a major news event, suddenly that will pop to the forefront and you get a real sense of the zeitgeist of what Australians are watching at that point. You can actually see shows move, which, in a ratings sense, even though we’re primarily about delivering content and secondarily about commercials, is really interesting.

WS: Because of the language and cultural similarities, you offer a lot of American and U.K. shows. Are any in particular hot this season?
CROWLEY: The simple tradition is that we have probably watched more drama from the U.S., although we have a deep historic passion for British drama, and then we flip around and we watch a lot of lifestyle and documentaries from England and the U.K. and secondarily from the U.S. I suspect that has more to do with colonial heritage. We have a fantastic relationship with the HBO team and the Showtime team and we have a great slate of AMC shows, but when it comes to lifestyle and more hands-on renovation, we watch more U.K. shows. The homes that we have in Australia are homes that match British homes from 100 years ago that they are renovating as well. We have the same issues with dodgy old plumbing and hundred-year-old brickwork and all that sort of stuff. So we tend to watch that more than maybe the expansive American [lifestyle shows].

WS: You also carry international channels alongside your own.
CROWLEY: We’ve had great longstanding relationships with all of the big channel groups: Discovery, National Geographic and FOX International Channels, and the Viacom group of channels. We are especially thrilled with the BBC First Channel [that offers the best British comedy and drama]. [BBC Worldwide is] rolling out BBC as a first-run brand around the world and their first launch was in Australia. It’s going amazingly well. It’s not a complete transplant of any one of the BBC channels, but it’s fantastic brand and a great initiative.

WS: Foxtel has also been investing in its own original productions, which are doing very well.
CROWLEY: Ironically one of our challenges when talking to producers is that if we are looking for new shows, we have to move an existing show off to the side. It’s difficult to tell producers that if the show is still doing quite well.

We love the big formats. We’ve done River Cottage, which did particularly well. Anything to do with property and real estate in Australia is huge, Selling Houses Australia and Location, Location, Location. Our original dramas are just stellar at the moment. Devil’s Playground was our drama about the Catholic Church from last year. It won the AACTA [Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts] Award this year for best miniseries and the award is rightly deserved. We’ve seen the first episodes of The Kettering Incident, which is coming soon, and Deadline Gallipoli, which looks just spectacular. Australia has its 100th anniversary of a World War I episode that defined the nation, Gallipoli. A number of people have done variations on it and we’re incredibly proud of our version that is from the journalists who told the story of the war. The Kettering Incident is a step away from traditional Australian relationship drama. It’s a really beautiful piece of television by Vincent Stream, who traditionally shoots film.

WS: It’s an amazing time for television. Everywhere, there is so much wonderful work.
CROWLEY: I can’t remember a time that delivered such variety and supported such creativity across the board. Whether it’s big shiny floor shows and competitions, whether it’s comedy, whether it’s observational reality, whether it’s documentary—with the advances in technology allowing people to tell documentary stories—or whether it’s just simply the growth in the industry, which has nurtured a generation of writers who can now really step away from the mainstream and start to explore the edges of the mind, it’s a spectacular time in television.

WS: Tell us about Presto, the joint venture with Seven West Media.
CROWLEY: As every market is experiencing, there is a transition from linear and appointment viewing to on-demand viewing. Although I have to say, I believe appointment viewing attaches itself to a very strong emotional and communal experience and I don’t think it will ever entirely disappear. But obviously people are moving to on-demand viewing and we launched Presto last year with a movie product, with a fairly complete offering with most of the movies available in the Australian territory. A few months ago, we added television to the mix, so it’s a combination of features and a really carefully curated mix of quality television.

WS: I have read that a lot of different players are stepping into the pay-TV business in Australia, whether linear or online. Is that one of the major issues impacting the market right now?
CROWLEY: The market in Australia is in the process of a major transformation, as one might expect. Australia is a very outwardly looking culture. It voraciously consumes culture from everywhere: food, entertainment, music, everything. What is happening is that Internet and IP-delivered entertainment is coming to the territory. We have formed a joint venture with Seven, who is a particularly strong local partner. Channel Nine has formed a venture with Fairfax who is a media partner. Netflix is obviously coming. Amazon has opened up an Australian portal for ebooks and I don’t know what that means for other content. GooglePlay is in Australia. iTunes has been here for ten years. Very clearly Australia is in a period of transformation. The advertising market will tell you that advertising is drifting away from, or at least exploring boundaries away from, old-fashioned linear advertising—which still, to be fair, commands an enormous audience, and does demand appointment viewing—into other modes such as digital advertising. That in turn drives other business models.

WS: With all these homegrown streaming platforms available is Australia a little less leery of Netflix, than say, Germany or France have been?
CROWLEY: If you were to talk to distributors, Australia is a particularly competitive market, possibly because we were for the longest time restrained by regulation to only three broadcasters, so it was a pretty vehemently fought and well-funded battleground and it teaches certain habits of behavior. So we welcome the transformation but its not going to be a walkover of the local culture, that’s for sure.

WS: Given the fact that Foxtel has been around for 20 years, is a brand that is well known to its customers and is a good partner for programming suppliers, I would think it’s in a solid position in this new competitive landscape.
CROWLEY: I would like to say we are. For all of the transformations in technology and infrastructure and delivery, the real story is about unique and original content and creating events and moments. I’m a believer that one of the reasons people seek entertainment is to share the experience of it. One of the challenges when you watch it by yourself on demand is that you can’t really talk about it a lot until you know everybody else has caught up to you. So I think there will be a segment of society that will just want to burrow through and catch some shows and move on and there are others who actually want to share the experience.

We launched a local version of GoggleBox, which in America was called The People’s Couch and in the U.K. is GoggleBox [an observational documentary that shows people in front of television sets watching shows and talking about them]. It really illuminated that shared experience. People actually quite enjoy that ephemeral social aspect of enjoying laughter or tears together. And sitting alone by yourself and watching a show is not quite the same experience.

WS: Sports is also an appointment-viewing genre.
CROWLEY: Absolutely. Fox Sports in Australia is owned and operated by a different company. It’s a wholly owned division of News Limited, the newspaper side of News Corporation. The head of Fox Sports is Patrick Delaney. They service us a package of six channels, not unlike other independent channels, like Sky News or a BBC channel.

WS: Certainly sports are important to the pay-TV business.
CROWLEY: It’s huge and we co-invest with Fox Sports. We’ve just taken on a spectacular new coverage package for the V8 Supercars, which is similar to the NASCAR in America. It’s always been covered in Australia but this year we are covering the trials and the festival that goes with it, which you can afford to do when you have a number of channels and the space to do it. Ultimately it all culminates in a big race, but we’ve decided to take the entire package behind the scenes and we expect a lot of passionate fans to buy into it.