TVNZ in Auckland. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
Analysis - TVNZ has told its staff of a new cost-cutting reorganisation, which will further reduce the state-owned broadcaster's scope and scale. Mediawatch looks at the background to this - and asks if last year's scrapped media merger was a missed opportunity.
On TVNZ's Q+A recently, ACT leader David Seymour said history would show charter schools had been a success.
"In a decade's time, you'll be interviewing someone (about that) - and looking exactly the same," he told the youthful TVNZ host Jack Tame.
"I think the future of the media is even bleaker than that for politicians," Tame replied with tongue-in-cheek ... sort of.
After TVNZ announced big cuts to news in March, Jack Tame told listeners of his Newstalk ZB show "trying to save free-to-air commercial TV with quality news, current affairs and local programming ... is like trying to bail out the Titanic with an empty ice cream container".
(For Tame it was also very personal. His TVNZ bosses had just torpedoed his wife's flagship show Sunday.)
Tame blamed declining ad revenue drifting frictionlessly to offshore tech platforms.
"I'm not aware of any comparable broadcast markets where they've managed to pull it off," he told listeners.
But this is what TVNZ's top brass are trying to do with its strategy called Digital+.
Unlike the controversial cuts back in March which killed off Fair Go, Sunday and two news bulletins, TVNZ said today that "individual roles are not part of this consultation".
TVNZ said the priority was to "share proposals with our people first" on strategic changes before consulting staff formally this month.
Part of the latest plan is to close the live news website and app 1NewsNow in February next year.
The youth-focused Re: News site will now focus "solely on video storytelling". Its staff was cut from 10 down to six last April.
Earlier, TVNZ chief executive Jodi O'Donnell had told staff consolidating teams and resources, outsourcing and content and websites "that aren't profitable" were all being considered.
But finding the money for the strategy from savings will require more than tinkering with online news, staff rosters and outsourcing.
Timeline of belt-tightening
"I don't think TVNZ has made any secret of trying to find $30 million in either new revenue or cost savings over the next financial year," TVNZ's executive editor of news Phil O'Sullivan told Mediawatch in July.
That was just after TVNZ declared revenue down by $39m in 2023.
"It's destabilising and it takes our eye off covering the news every day, which we still have to do. But when your costs are higher than your revenue ... you have to adjust and that's what we're focused on doing."
TVNZ first focused on this when it told staff in September 2023 significant cuts to content production, programmes and operational spending were coming.
Future projects were placed under review, pay rises for top-earning staff were scrapped and recruitment for vacant roles was "paused."
Acting chief executive Brent McAnulty (now TVNZ's chief operating officer) said senior executives had identified "all the possible cost savings opportunities we have".
Further bad financial results last March triggered the controversial closures of Fair Go, Sunday and daily news bulletins and the redundancies of staff working on them.
But the savings were estimated at just $10m.
Is streaming the killer - or the saviour?
Embarking on the cost-cutting last year, TVNZ staff were assured it still had a "strong share of television audience and revenue" and its online platform TVNZ+ had an "impressive growth trajectory".
True. And TVNZ has boosted it by launching live and on-demand sport on the platform and adding news content recently.
Users' registrations have enabled TVNZ to better target them with digital ads on the platform.
But digital ad revenue is much less lucrative than TV advertising has been in the past.
Creating a paid/subscriber service out of TVNZ+ could raise revenue too, but it may not pay off and it would also be vulnerable if rival streamers discounted their services.
TVNZ+ has also been a victim of its own success by straining TVNZ's IT capacity. TVNZ is planning what it says is "an essential $100m overhaul" of its digital technology.
The 'beyond broadcast' transition to streaming is also underway outside TVNZ.
In May the official briefing to the incoming media minister Paul Goldsmith said Freeview was planning for a "sector transition" away from digital terrestrial broadcasting.
In July TVNZ's own (now doomed) 1News.co.nz site reported "traditional free-to-air broadcasts face being 'sunset' over the next decade, with media giants plotting for an internet-only and streaming-dominated future".
Merger a missed chance?
Internationally, TVNZ is an outlier - a state-owned yet fully-commercial broadcaster trying to do news on TV and online, but disconnected from other publicly-funded broadcasters operating on TV, radio and online.
Treasury has long warned that changing audience patterns and digital media alternatives could turn TVNZ into a liability rather than a deliverer of dividends.
Having concluded "the status quo is not an option" the previous government proposed merging TVNZ and RNZ in a new 'public media entity' operating on radio, on TV and online.
But it scrapped the plan before the last election citing the cost of living crisis.
In opposition, National Party leader Christopher Luxon described it as "ideological and insane" and "a solution looking for a problem".
But TVNZ's recent financial results make clear there is a big problem.
"Surely nobody is surprised that this ecosystem is not sustainable any longer. Something radical had to change," Tracey Martin - the chairperson of the board charged with getting the doomed public media entity up and running told Mediawatch in March after TVNZ's news cuts.
The new entity would still have needed commercial TV revenue.
"But would it have been cuts to news and current affairs that we would have been seeing? There would have been other decisions made because commerciality ... was not the major driver (of the new entity)," Martin said.
Earlier this month the CEO of the other publicly-funded national TV network Whakaata Māori said it might pull the plug on its Te Ao Māori News TV news service as a part of a suite of cuts in response to a funding shortfall.
Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith has acknowledged the financial crisis facing the media is now acute.
While the plight of most commercial media companies is not core business for him, questions about how small state-owned TVNZ could become have to be answered soon.