Network Ten eyes NRL bid even as losses balloon to $480m in two years
The smallest of three commercial broadcasters has found itself with new, deep-pocketed owners after its parent company was acquired by the Ellison family.
Network Ten has lost nearly half a billion dollars over the past two years, but is now considering whether to make a bid for the blockbuster NRL broadcasting rights after its owner, American entertainment and streaming giant Paramount, was acquired by one of the world’s richest men.
New filings with the corporate regulator show the network, which broadcasts shows like MasterChef and Survivor, lost $322 million in 2023 and $162 million last year. A separate entity that represents the local sales and marketing for the Paramount+ streaming business reported slim profits of $3.5 million and $3.4 million over the same period, its accounts show.
Network Ten CEO Beverley McGarvey said the broadcaster would look closely at bidding for the NRL rights from 2027. Getty
The enormous losses raise new questions about the long-term future of Network Ten, long the third-largest of the three commercial broadcasters.
While Seven Network and Nine Network face the same challenges – advertisers migrating online and audiences switching to streaming – Ten is particularly exposed, given its viewership has traditionally skewed younger, and are more likely to ditch free-to-air, than those at its major rivals.
The accounts lodged with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission show Ten’s advertising revenue fell $100 million last year. Nine, which is owned by Nine Entertainment, the publisher of The Australian Financial Review, said broadcast revenues were flat last year.
“Obviously, there are ongoing changes in the advertising environment, and we all need to work as that evolves. We took out The Project, which was a big deal,” said Beverley McGarvey, the president of Network Ten.
Ten collapsed into administration in 2017, when it was a listed company backed by billionaire businessmen Lachlan Murdoch and Bruce Gordon.
It was acquired by American network CBS, which merged with the company now known as Paramount in 2019. Earlier this year, Paramount was acquired by Skydance Media, the movie studio behind Top Gun: Maverick and the most recent two Mission: Impossible films in a $12 billion deal.
“MasterChef” is one of Ten’s most popular shows, but the network is struggling to hold on to its younger demographic.
The newly renamed Paramount Skydance is controlled by David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men with a personal fortune estimated at $460 billion by Bloomberg.
McGarvey said Ten would look closely at bidding for the NRL broadcast rights from 2027 – currently held by Nine and due to be put out to tender within weeks – as she pointed to Skydance’s interest in sports deals.
“We’d be silly to not even look at it. Skydance have just dropped $US7.7 billion [$11.8 billion] on the UFC, and that includes the Australian rights, which we’re thrilled about. And as a global business, they have made really material content investments recently.
“So I think, like everything, like we do with every sport, we will look at it tactically,” she added. “They certainly have the capacity to invest in the right partners at the right time.”
Network Ten CEO Beverley McGarvey. Rhett Wyman
Steve Allen, a media analyst and director of research at advertising agency Pearman, said Ten lacked the type of tier one sports rights that remained major drawcards for audiences despite the shift to streaming.
“That is their Achilles heel. Until they enter that race for parts of AFL, NRL, cricket or tennis, it is hard to envision a climb of any meaningful dimension. Big Brother will not do it, but at least they are trying with a format more in tune with their core demographics and character,” he said.
“We, the advertising industry, need Network Ten for competitive tension alone. It is hard to see how they will get to profit – or even break even – any time soon. They do not seem to have a strategy to do so.”
McGarvey, who was appointed president of Ten last year, cut $49 million in costs in 2024 and has pursued a different strategy to Seven and Nine. Instead of building up its own platform, Ten has been looking outside to grow audiences. It recently signed a deal with electronics giant LG to put itself on LG Channels, the 130 free streams available on LG televisions. Ten has also signed on to sell advertising across all of those channels.
It has a separate agreement with TikTok to livestream the cameras inside this year’s Big Brother Australia house 24 hours a day in a bid to reach new, younger viewers. It is also putting entire episodes of 10News+, its poorly received replacement for The Project, on Spotify and YouTube.
While it is yet to demonstrate the financial return of these moves, McGarvey said they were tactical and would pay off in the longer term.
“With Big Brother on TikTok, certain younger demographics, frankly, may not have been alive the last time we had Big Brother. So we just need to reach those audiences in a different way,” she said.
“Probably three to five years ago, everybody would have had a walled garden approach, keeping your content in your own environment. I think that’s just not viable. Now we need to put the content where the audiences are.”
In a statement, a Ten spokeswoman said its results had been improving and would be helped by the purchase of regional stations from Southern Cross Media.
The network was aiming at profitability “by delivering structural cost efficiencies [and] transformation initiatives, plus the recent expansion of its footprint into the regional areas creating new opportunities for advertising revenue,” she said. “Management has adopted these strategic initiatives with the full support of [Paramount Skydance].”
