TVNZ says the economy, the changing media landscape and a “difficult advertising market” are behind a $28.5m loss for the year.
The broadcaster announced the results today, in line with the early warning it gave about its financial situation three months ago.
The company also announced a net loss after tax of $85m for the year to the end of June including a non-cash impairment of $62.1m.
Revenues fell $38.8m during the year, while the company made cuts in spending of $9.9m and used $7.4m of its cash reserves.
CEO Jodi O’Donnell pointed to the success in reaching audiences during the year, both on TV and on digital.
“Despite this, and our careful management of costs, our financial performance reflects a constrained economy, market disruption and a difficult advertising market,” she said. “It has been an extremely challenging period for ad-funded broadcasters globally, including TVNZ, but we are confident in our turnaround plan and digital strategy.”
O’Donnell said TVNZ has sufficient cash to fund its digital strategy over the next three years, build a “robust and scalable” technology platform and return to profit.
The company will not pay a dividend to the Government this year but O’Donnell said the decline in the market was currently “moderating” and looking brighter than the previous financial year. “We are cautiously planning for a stabilising of the economy and expect challenging market conditions to continue until the end of the calendar year,” she said.
“We continue to be disciplined on our cost outlook and are working with our people to find solutions to a $30m challenge in FY25. We need to stabilise losses quickly and continue with a multi-year programme to strengthen our streaming technology. We have a clear commercial mandate and will deliver on this and innovate at pace to be a more sustainable media business.
“We’ve proven our ability to deliver must-watch content for viewers and unrivalled scale for advertisers. Now our focus is on maximising new ways to monetise our content so we’re in a strong position to take advantage when the market stabilises.”
Reaching audiences, advertising changes
TVNZ said it was the highest reaching content provider across TV, while TVNZ+ was ahead of YouTube and Netflix in NZ on Air’s Where are the Audiences? 2024 survey. 1News was surveyed as the most popular and trusted source of news in that report.
Sport had also seen growth. After launching a dedicated home for sport on TVNZ+ in June 2023, sport content was viewed by almost 910,000 accounts, with close to 15.4 million streams in the first 12 months.
O’Donnell added: “Our team presented record breaking 2023 General Election coverage and brought New Zealand cricket back to free-to-view. From critically acclaimed dramas like After the Party or premium docu-series, Escaping Utopia, to favourites including Celebrity Treasure Island, Country Calendar, Shortland Street and Taskmaster NZ, our channels and platforms had something for all New Zealanders.
“We’re continuing to transform how we bring news and current affairs to digital audiences, with a more prominent home for news content on TVNZ+ making it easier for viewers to access our programming. We’ve seeing good growth in our digital news, with a 16% increase in weekly news viewership on TVNZ+ in FY24.”
The company said it had also introduced six new innovations for advertisers during the year.
“The new advertiser data tools we’ve brought to market as part of our transformation programme provide significant growth opportunity,” O’Donnell said. “The preparatory work for our IP Programme has been completed, and TVNZ is well placed to begin progressing more initiatives that will realise value in 2025.
“This is a significant programme of work that will flip the priorities of our operating model so that our TV broadcast channels become ‘a consumer’ of our digital operations. This year, we’ll prioritise an overall uplift of Data and AI capability across the business so we can innovate further and faster to meet evolving audience needs.”