The saying 'what goes up, must come down' is an old piece of folk wisdom. In the audiovisual content market, this certainly isn’t different. Over the past 6 years, we have enjoyed a true boom in content development and - production, which was soon labeled as “the golden years of television”. This year brings the expected correction: media companies are issuing profit warnings left and right. Whether it's RTL or ProSiebenSat1 in Europe, or global giants like Disney, Paramount or WarnerDiscovery, tough times prevail.

A further analysis of the figures from these media companies, reveals several clear trends. The traditional television business is struggling due to declining advertising expenditures. Especially in Germany the market has collapsed, which significantly impacts financial results in the media sector. In the Netherlands, the situation has been somewhat cushioned by sharply increased GRP-prices, but in other countries, the storm clouds are gathering.

Another – more creeping  –  effect is the inevitable shift in viewing behavior. The UK's Ofcom, which unlike our Dutch Media Authority does consistently provide solid research reports, reported this month that the change in viewing behaviour is accelerating among older viewers also. Linear viewing time in Great Britain among those aged 64+ decreased by 8% in the past year. It doesn’t bode well for broadcasters, if even their most devoted audience shifts to online.

Many media companies are now inclined to make their figures look a bit less rosy, when the market is already somewhat unfavorable. In the current climate, financial engineering has become interesting again, with various profit concepts being mixed together. Playing around with deprecation charges on produced content seems to be a common practice, with the potential write-off by WarnerDiscovery on the already produced Batgirl film as the ‘highlight’. The message is clear: the commercial market is experiencing a dip. As is often the case when the market is down, the public broadcasters are the ones consistently continuing to invest. For this reason, among others, BBC Studios has had a successful year and will do this again in 2023.

Nevertheless, all media companies are subject to the same phenomena: if they don't establish a robust streaming operation, they’re destined to fail. The challenge is that there are still very few organizations capable of operating a streaming service at a break-even point, let alone profitably. This additional financial burden poses significant problems in both the public and commercial domain. Consequently, it's logical that producers are focusing on their traditional roles in the value chain: creating and producing compelling audiovisual content. While demand may be somewhat decreasing, this mostly means that the oversaturated market of the past few years is normalizing to some extent. A blessing in disguise for producers.

For the broadcasters however, it's all hands on deck. The easiest approach is to cut in the content costs, but that would mean falling further behind on the most successful global streamers (Netflix and Amazon). These are challenging times!