Australian cable TV giant Foxtel have finally confirmed that they will launch a new dedicated SVOD service with new reports indicating it will arrive next Monday (May 25th).
While they have yet to officially confirm the name of the new streaming product, the company has recently registered name and logo trademarks under the brand name ‘Binge’. The new service has been built by the same team using the same platform as that of their well-received dedicated sports service ‘Kayo’.
The company has spent the past 18 months renegotiating content deals with its studio partners to secure SVOD rights for the new service to compete directly against Netflix, Stan, Amazon and Disney+.
Binge will launch with around 10,000 hours of curated content including local and international drama and movies from Sony Pictures & TV, NBCUniversal, FX, The BBC and WarnerMedia.
It’s expected the new service will be the answer to HBO Max in Australia and so shows like “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory” will move from Stan to Binge while high profile HBO content will be a big selling point of the service.
Foxtel Group Chief Executive Officer Patrick Delany said in a press statement:
“We have been beta-testing the service for a few weeks and we are sure Australians will love everything about it. It brings an exciting new brand to younger streaming audiences with a very different and compelling product experience, and a distinctly curated mix of the best drama and movies from the world’s best entertainment brands…
Our new entertainment streaming service, which launches next Monday, provides a different curation of the Foxtel Group’s entertainment content focussed on mobile devices and the streaming generation who want to share on the big screen. It is distinctly branded and aimed at part of the Australian market who either don’t want to pay for our premium product or who have decided Foxtel is not for them.”
Full details of the new service including pricing packages and content will be announced this Friday with the price expected to be $15 per month. Discounted packages will be available for News Corp subscribers, and the service is expected to have an Apple TV app at launch.
Foxtel has been criticised in the past for the low bitrate it uses on many of its channels, so it’s not clear how much of the new service will be in HD and whether they will try and adopt more modern standards like 4K Ultra HD with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos which their main competition like Netflix and Amazon regularly employ.
Source: TV Black Box, The Australian Financial Review
