David Hua, SBS’s Director, Audio Language Content material, talking at SBS’s 2023 Upfront, mentioned radio would all the time be an essential a part of SBS and that the change from SBS Radio to SBS Audio subsequent 12 months displays the continued success in remodeling right into a cross-platform audio supplier, masking broadcast radio, dwell streaming, digital publishing, and podcasting.
“Immediately, SBS’s audio providing isn’t just a linear radio community – we’ve got reworked into a really platform agnostic multilingual audio and digital broadcaster and writer, and we’re persevering with to evolve our companies for an more and more various Australia”, mentioned Hua.
“Each week, we broadcast greater than 262 hours of unique audio content material and publish a whole bunch of articles in additional than 60 languages. We’re quickly seeing audiences embrace audio streaming and podcasting, with greater than six million streams and podcast downloads each month.”
Hua famous the distinctive place SBS Audio has within the Australian media panorama due to its distinctive content material and its connection to Australian communities.
SBS Audio serves the greater than 5.5 million Australians who communicate a language apart from English at dwelling, in addition to offering content material in English, and for these studying a brand new language. It additionally has three music channels (SBS PopAsia, SBS PopDesi and SBS Chill) that have interaction all Australians by means of music and tradition from around the globe. SBS Arabic24 and SBS Chinese language present complete companies for Australia’s largest language group throughout a rising audio and digital providing.
“The change to SBS Audio in 2023 displays that, at a time when each writer and broadcaster is pivoting to audio and broadcasting ,SBS is already effectively established,” Hua mentioned.
“Our largest podcasts are among the many most listened to in Australia. The Handmaid’s Story isn’t only a pressure on SBS OnDemand, our companion podcast, Eyes on Gilead, has a whole bunch of hundreds of downloads every season, and tops charts globally.
“What different community launches a podcast like Colours of Cricket, providing a novel South Asian perspective on how a love of the game has introduced communities collectively? Or Chinese language-ish, a podcast by younger Chinese language-Australians, for younger Chinese language-Australians?
“Or our podcast which expresses The Uluru Assertion from the Coronary heart, in over 80 languages (together with 20 First Nations languages), has been downloaded greater than 200,000 instances in simply the final three months alone.
“SBS Audio’s means to talk to audiences in over 60 languages, and our reference to the communities we serve constructed on greater than 45 years of broadcasting, proceed to be our particular superpowers.”
For manufacturers, the shift to digital opens up new alternatives with pre-roll and mid-roll promoting from throughout SBS’s audio community.
“There’s a massive, extremely engaged viewers delivering,” mentioned Adam Sadler, Director of Media Gross sales, SBS. “The advantage of this shift is we’re in a position to attain particular and extremely engaged communities in a means which is each efficient and clearly measurable.”
In recent times, SBS Audio highlighted the facility of its connection to various audiences, launching bespoke choices such because the multilingual SBS Coronavirus Portal offering a spot the place Australians may entry essential data and the most recent information of their most popular language. It contains explainers, infographics, and sources for communities and companies, and with audiences accessing the content material greater than 11 million instances.
Final month, SBS launched a brand new providing with Thoughts Your Well being, a portal that includes articles, podcasts, and movies in a number of languages, aimed toward offering Australians from multicultural and First Nations communities with wellbeing and psychological well being tales and pathways to help.
