Presto

» see presto.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Turkey got this same fight on a slightly later clock, and I watched that one from close range. The pay television operators here had spent years selling bundles nobody could get out of, and when streaming turned up their answer was an app of their own rather than a cheaper bundle. BluTV arrived in 2016 and Netflix opened in Turkey the same year. Presto is the Australian version of that story, and by the time mine started it had already finished.

Foxtel launched Presto on 13 March 2014 as a movie service at AU$19.99 a month, cut that to $9.99 in August, and added Presto TV as a separate subscription on 15 January 2015. Buying both at once was called Presto Entertainment and cost $14.99. Seven West Media took half the company in a deal announced on 8 December 2014, which put a free-to-air broadcaster and a pay television operator on the same cap table.

The catalog was not the weak point. Presto carried output deals with most of the major American studios and it had HBO, which in Australia meant The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire but not Game of Thrones, because Foxtel kept that one for itself. On paper it was as strong a library as anything in the country.

~ the record ~

~ the arithmetic ~

Netflix opened in Australia on 24 March 2015. By May, Presto had 97,000 subscribers while Netflix Australia was being counted at just over a million. Presto reached roughly 130,000 by September 2016, which is growth, and it is also the wrong kind of growth. A competitor had taken ten times the market in the time it took Presto to add thirty thousand people.

The split subscription is the part that reads worst now. Presto asked an Australian household to decide whether it wanted films or television and to pay twice if the answer was both, in the same season a competitor was charging one price for one app that never asked the question. That structure came out of how the rights had been bought and how Foxtel had always sold television. It made sense inside the building and nowhere outside it.

~ the postmortem ~

In October 2016 Foxtel bought Seven West Media's half back and said Presto would close. It ran until 31 January 2017, and from December subscribers were moved across to Foxtel Play, which was renamed Foxtel Now a few months later. Same company, same content, under a name that had stopped pretending to be a separate product.

Quickflix, the Australian service that had been at this since the DVD-by-post years, went into administration in 2016. Stan, the Nine and Fairfax venture that launched eleven days after Presto TV, is still running, and the difference is that Stan was built as a streaming company instead of as a defensive move by a cable operator. Presto was never really trying to win. It was trying to slow something down, and it was switched off the month its owner accepted that the slowing had not worked.

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