As i said above, there'll be quarter-to-quarter noise and maybe over any given 6 month period advertising spend will rise slightly, but the secular backdrop is that FTA TV viewership is steadily declining - from 2015 to 2016 it declined by 5% (in terms of minutes watched), and from 2016 to 2017 a further 7%. Moreover, these headline figures mask the bigger problem - the demographic breakdown is that those 35 years are under are rapidly reducing their FTA TV viewership (much faster than the headline numbers), whereas those aged 50+ are about steady - this is to be expected as older folk tend to adopt new technology more slowly, but they'll migrate to SVOD / OTT streaming as well before too long. If FTA TV doesn't have the eyeballs - which are migrating away, indisputably - then advertising spend must go down over time. I don't consider this an opinion, just a fact.
That's just the revenue problem that FTA TV has. The other half of the equation is the cost problem - content costs are going up.
It confounds me that PRT holders either can't understand this dynamic or refuse to acknowledge it - the above two trends are readily observable from PRT's own financial statements (i.e. falling revenue and increased content costs = lower gross margin on largely fixed cost base = magnified fall at NPAT/EBIT level).
PRT Price at posting:
23.0¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
