TVNZ OnDemand New Catch-Up Superhero
January 14, 2016 
3 Comments
From the creators of The Flash and Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow combines characters from both shows with new heroes from the DC Comics pantheon like Rip Hunter, Jeff Jackson and reincarnated warrior queen Hawkgirl. The cast includes Arrow’s Brandon Routh as The Atom and Caity Lotz as the resurrected Sara Lance/White Canary, and The Flash’s Victor Garber as Dr Martin Stein, Wentworth Miller as Captain Cold and Dominic Purcell as Heat Wave.
The latest DC Comics adaptation for TV, Legends of Tomorrow, will premiere here on TVNZ OnDemand.
While that’s a blow for HD viewers, the PQ of TVNZ’s catch-up streaming service has improved if you watch it on a high-end devices like PlayStation 4 or FreeviewPlus.
“For these deployments we have increased our bandwidth and we are using HD source files,” TVNZ’s OnDemand general manager Jason Foden says.
“The end result is a picture of near-HD quality. The difference between the TVNZ stream quality on these end points and Netflix is difficult to distinguish.”
It’s certainly a big step up from 3Now’s app if still shy of 1080i broadcast. But why can’t the bandwidth be increased for Freeview|HD devices, like my TiVo or three-year-old Panasonic Blu-ray/hard drive recorder?
“I guess the short answer is cost versus reach means we have to prioritise,” Foden says.
“TiVo is a legacy platform with a loyal but reducing user base whereas PlayStation has a very large user base and PS4 is growing.”
Legends of Tomorrow, which premieres January 21 in the US, is the latest in a raft of TVOD premieres that highlights the platform’s versatility for everything from exclusives to continuing series online that tank in primetime (like The Flash, which TV2 pulled last year but kept fans up to date with on TVOD).
Gloriavale: Life and Death, which ScreenScribe.tv previewed exclusively last year, was the most streamed programme of 2015 on TVOD.
TVNZ says more than “one billion minutes of content” was viewed last year on its relaunched site, including 12,208 episodes, promos and extras.
Gloriavale was the single most-watched show, with 70,000-plus streams per episode, while December’s top programmes were Shortland Street (which averaged nearly 35,000 streams an episode), The Flash, Home and Away, Supergirl, Empire, 800 Words, Coronation Street, The Vampire Diaries, Arrow and Jekyll and Hyde (Diaries and Jekyll were the only premieres in the top 10).
TVNZ says the Shortland Street finale had 82,436 streams in December, making it the serial’s fourth most watched episode ever, “with this likely to rise through January as thelivingmoment.co.nz continues to drive engagement viewers catch up before the new season” starts on Monday with an hour-long premiere.
TVNZ boosted interest in the platform with 170 hours of exclusive “Box Set” titles and upgraded the app to offer more personalised features, with watchlists, recommendations, favourite shows and “pick up and play”, which allows you to resume viewing where you left off.
TVNZ OnDemand’s box set exclusives can be viewed for most of this year and range from W1A, Threesome and The Deep to new Sharpe adventures and documentaries like What Happened Before the Big Bang?
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January 14, 2016 at 1:50 pm
Please help me understand the TVNZ OnDemand strategy. It used to be that new content would be acquired, [heavily] marketed and scheduled appropriately (time/channel) for its target audience. If it didn’t get the eyeballs it got rescheduled and run-off. Nowadays some of it goes TVNZ OnDemand and then reshown months later in late/graveyard. Firstwatches get ~35,000 views with iZombie getting the best at 52,000 streams per episode. Is TVNZ essentially saying it expects to get an audience of 2% or less if it broadcasts so it’s better to stream as a Firstwatch and use the schedule for some higher/better use? Wouldnt a better strategy be to build an audience via broadcast and if it doesnt work then run-off via OnDemand (not limited by scarce scheduling) a la The Flash? Those households that dont watch on a Live+7 basis are more than likely to the streaming demographic, anyway, that will continue to consume via streaming.
I think TVNZ’s happy to use OnDemand as a test tube for new product (to see how it fares before scheduling it on air), as a dumping ground for flops (like Home Free) that are easier to burn off online than on air, as a vehicle to consolidate viewership of signature shows like Coro and Shortland Street, and as a sponge for all the product it can’t accommodate on TV1 or TV2 (but which it doesn’t want to lose to rivals). These exclusives also elevate OnDemand beyond being merely a catch-up service. Personally, I would rather TVNZ axed its +1 channels on Freeview|HD and combined them into a showcase for HD product that isn’t quite ready for primetime.
I, for one, am getting tied of TVNZ and MediaWorks putting their new stuff On Demand rather than traditional OTA TV. I also don’t want to watch these things with SD picture and forced ads.