Foxtel boss Patrick Delany says streamers are getting it wrong, says Australia is not America

International streaming services have wrongly assumed that Australian viewers want only “Americanesque” titles and have underestimated the cost of building up a sustainable local subscription base, the head of pay TV operator Foxtel says.

Patrick Delany also warns that there will probably be a shakeout of the more than one dozen paid streamers on offer locally as Foxtel prepares to launch a new TV operating system next year, which will bundle multiple streaming services into one interface.

It will also help them find shows available across streaming apps and will offer to bundle multiple services into one bill.

“There will be very close to 5 million accounts for that business to market into in terms of providing an aggregated service and buying our products.

Mr Delany said the streaming market was still growing in Australia – but only for services that could get the mix of local and overseas content right.

But I think this late in the game, people underestimate this market, and they think of this market as being Americanesque,” Mr Delany said.

I think you can get to a million subscribers, and after that, it becomes more difficult.”.

The local streaming market is dominated by Netflix, which had more than 6 million subscribers as of June 30, according to market service firm Telsyte.

Foxtel runs four streaming services, and the number of paid streaming subscribers increased by 4 per cent to 2.8 million between June 30 and September 30.

“There probably isn’t another market in the world where just about every streamer is there,” Mr Delany said.

We’re also seeing continued success in streaming with close to 3 million streaming subscribers and over 4.6 million total subscribers,” Mr Delany said.