One of the many ironies of the internet age is that while things are easier than ever to get hold of, finding them in the first place keeps on getting harder. A couple decades ago, if you wanted to watch Australian television, you turned on your television set and had the choice of five channels; today your television set isn’t even the first place you’d look – if you own a television at all.
Being spoilt for choice is the kind of problem that usually isn’t really a problem. But for the Australian television industry, being lost in the crowd is a major issue. There’s not much point in making programming people can’t find, and yet the current media environment seems largely set up to keep local programming a secret.
Last week Screen Australia released their Screen Currency 2026 report. One of the major findings was that ‘discoverability is now as important as production’. A spokeperson for Screen Australia said that for Australian audiences ‘content discovery is driven less by active search and more by algorithms, social recommendations and peer influence’.
This is not good news.
Finding Australian shows – quick links
Algorithms vs Australian content
Social recommendations and peer influence basically boil down to hearing about new shows from friends and family. Where are they learning about them? Unless they work in the industry or spend a fair amount of time actively searching online, they’re finding out about content the same way you are: algorithms.
Algorithms are dubious at the best of times, and today is not the best of times. It’s no secret that the companies behind those algorithms have decided they’d much rather you keep on using them (and seeing the ads they make money from) than quickly find what you’re looking for and leave, making searching for anything online an increasingly arduous and futile process.
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For Australians, there’s also the problem that we are a very small part of the English-speaking internet. Algorithms are not optimised to serve you Australian content. Unless you know exactly what you’re looking for and where to look for it, your chances of finding anything more recent or relevant than a reference to Crocodile Dundee are increasingly slim.
The cost of streaming (and researching)
Then again, when the internet is awash with free content, why look for something that’s going to cost you money. Australian scripted drama has been all but abandoned by the free-to-air networks; only the ABC (and to a lesser extent, SBS) provide drama programming that’s available to all.
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Outside of them, if you’re looking for local drama, you’re looking at streaming services where it’s pay-to-play. But how do you discover if a series you’ve somehow learnt about is worth your time? If you’re hoping to take a look and figure it out that way, you’re out of luck.
Streaming services rarely offer ‘try before you buy’ options; you can read all the reviews you like, but free samples are hard to uncover, usually restricted, and designed to lock you into a paid service.
And that’s if you can even find reliable reviews of Australian content. Reviews of any kind are not a priority for algorithms; news and glitzy premieres fare slightly better, which is why pretty much every local TV series now seems to have a fancy red carpet launch at some flash Sydney venue.
Back in the days of newspapers, there’d be a weekly TV guide supplement that readers could browse through to find out what looked worthwhile in the coming week. Those guides still exist, but finding them online can be a struggle unless you already know the show you’re interested in – and even then they’re usually behind a paywall, giving you the option of paying to find out if you want to pay to watch a series.
Can we still rely on seek and ye shall find?
Little wonder then that Screen Australia’s Screen Currency 2026 report found that ‘strong interest doesn’t always translate into viewing’, with only 35% of respondents saying Australian content makes up more than a third of their viewing.
‘Despite widespread support for local stories,’ Screen Australia found ‘most Australians do not actively seek them out’. And if you don’t actively seek them out, in 2026 you’re not going to find them.
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Making television reviews and information more easily available to audiences is easier said than done. Online reviews are as much subject to the algorithms as the shows they’re covering, while overseas review aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes only rarely have listings for Australian programming.
With print newspapers and magazines all but dead, there’s no real way to promote local content to audiences outside of the internet. Maybe posters and billboards can make a comeback?
The old business model was based on the idea that if you gave people what they wanted – whether it was information about local content or the shows themselves – you could attract an audience, and you could then sell ads to people who wanted to access that audience. Today the balance has shifted, and the expectation is that if the audience is interested then the audience will pay.
Going by the Screen Australia figures, that may have been a little optimistic.
