10 hits refresh on logo, multichannels, drops 10 Play name.
10 declutters its branding, via 10 Comedy, 10 Drama, 10 "watch and stream free", and renaming 10 News.
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under News, Top Stories, Video
10 and 10 Play ➔ 10
10 Peach Comedy ➔ 10 Comedy
10 Bold Drama ➔ 10 Drama
10 News First ➔ 10 News
10Play.com.au ➔ 10.com.au
In a first for Australian broadcasters, Network 10 is consolidating its free-to-air (10), streaming (10 Play) and programming handles under one unified 10 brand.
Described as “a brand evolution” it sees a consistent identity system across all touchpoints – no matter where audiences watch.
10 Bold Drama becomes 10 Drama, 10 Peach Comedy becomes 10 Comedy, 10 News First becomes 10 News and 10 Play simply becomes 10 with shows teasing “watch and stream free.”
10Play.com.au will trim to 10.com.au.
The logo has also dropped the long-familiar circle for a cleaner look.
Karen Song, Head of Network Design, Paramount Australia said, “We’ve cleaned up our brand architecture, and that means getting rid of a lot of those sub-brands that didn’t service or didn’t have a place or needed to resonate differently in the current market.
“Really, it’s just streamlining, building on that equity that we already had, making sure that we’re modernised and future fit.”
Claudio Amati, Head of Network Creative, Paramount Australia said, “It’s about simplifying what is a really cluttered market with so many brands out there. There’s subscription, there’s free TV, and we really wanted to just make sure that 10, the master brand, is the hero.”
Paramount’s portfolio, includes MTV Studios, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, CBS, Showtime, and select hits from Paramount+. Currently, viewers have access to an abundance of live, free, ad-supported TV (FAST) channels powered by PlutoTV spanning entertainment, lifestyle, drama, kids, reality, comedy, talk shows, TV series, boxsets, movies, and more.
10’s digital library will expand further this year with the launch of new FAST channels: My Strange Addiction, Homicide Hunters, and Aftershock, plus Australian comedy favourites from Working Dog – The Cheap Seats and Thank God You’re Here – will also be joining the FAST channel line-up in August.
10 will also welcome a new British drama channel from All3Media Demand Drama, which will include TV series’ adaptations from novels by screenwriter Lynda La Plante.
L to R: Claudio Amati, Karen Song,
According to Amati, the refresh follows similar moves in the UK.
“We’re taking Channel Five’s lead with the ‘watch and stream free’ messaging. They actually used ‘watch and stream’. But we did research to make sure that we were hitting all the touch points. And what came out of the research five or six months ago was that there was confusion in the market as to what services were free and what services you paid for,” he explains.
“We decided to add the word ‘free’ on the end of that tagline… it also differentiates us from Paramount+, which is obviously our SVOD.”
The redesign has been led internally, in the pipeline for six months with minimal outsourcing to third parties.
“Production-wise, creative-wise we’ve done that all internally, in parallel of our (Business As Usual),” says Song. “The promos that we have to produce across all of our distribution channels, billboards, socials, everything.
“We’ve probably had no more than six people work on it since October, but more so in the last eight weeks when we’ve ramped it up.”
“We’re both veterans at 10. I’m coming on to 25 years, and Karen is coming up to 20 years,” Amati continues.
“We lived through the whole evolution of the Seriously brand, and then the evolution of bringing in the digital channels, 10Play. We started when there was just one 10, so we understood back then who we were, what we stood for.
“Then all these other things started coming from left, right and centre, and really started to clutter the market.
“Really, this is us just pulling it back now and stripping it down and making it actually easier for the consumer to understand.”
- Tagged with 10 News, 10 News First
23 Responses
And yet, the app still won’t work on either of my Sony tv’s….
It works on Chromecast but has this really annoying bug where, after you’ve passed the 2nd ad break in a show, if you try and rewind 10 seconds at any point after that, it’ll jump all the way back to the 2nd ad break and play all the ads again. If you try to close and resume the video it’ll play all the ads in that 2nd ad break again!
Just “10” for free viewing vs. Paramount+ for paid…makes sense to me. I had wondered what they would do to differentiate between linear viewing and streaming, but “watch and stream free” works well, certainly better than “…10 and 10play”
I quite like it, its sharp and neat
Network Ten has always been the invisible younger sibling among the commercial networks meanwhile SBS and ABC are taxpayer funded and don’t really have to think about branding. 10 (Peach) Comedy is just a variety channel with Family Feud, Everyday Gourmet and Bold & the beautiful to name a few that aren’t comedy. 10 news+ is just a current affairs. There may not be any advertising room for a third commercial broadcaster in the future as advertisers and viewers keep streaming platforms engaging audiences especially with Disney+ keep The Simpsons for themselves.
The new branding aesthetic (e.g. the circles/semi-circles) looks very similar to CBC in Canada.
This new network branding/On-Air Presentation is a fairly decent refresh as far as these things go, although for the main channel it’s really more a refreshed version of the previous look used since (I think) 2023 than anything else.
While the “circle-less 10” logo has made for a cleaner look overall, one really wonders why it’s taken them so long to fully adopt a concept whose origins can be traced back to at least the “Turn on 10” promos of 2014 – over 11 years ago!
I’m surprised though that channel names in the EPG (or whatever the technical term for this on DVB-T is) are still “10 BOLD DRAMA” and “10 Peach Comedy” today though. Perhaps they’ll become “10 drama” and “10 comedy” once the latter channel is flipped over to MPEG4 HD in metropolitan markets? 🤔
For some reason, the new news graphics (from what I’ve seen of them so far) remind me of a hybrid between current and previous Nine News packages. Also a pity the theme music wasn’t updated, but oh well…
If Ten spent as much, on keeping their staff and making decent shows, as they do on rebrands and evolutions of pretty logos and words on a screen- they might have better ratings and a better business.
My regular EPG site, has started using the old channel numbers for the 10 Network, ie. Channel 12, 10 Drama, Channel 15, 10 HD. Perhaps they’re waiting for the new logos or the site owner (Ch 9) is playing games.
So Paramount Networks UK & Australia are basically following what they did in the UK with having them as 5Action, 5Select, 5Star, 5USA, and 5 on TV and 5 for the streamer as well, though they also have others as 5[insert name] on PlutoTV there (it’s separate to the 5 Streamer).
I thought 10Play was a good, distinctive brand. Its not a bit too hard to distinguish between TV and BVOD.
When i watched the Masterchef encore on 10, I noticed the circular watermark has been removed and was replaced with a standalone 10 Logo.
Its funny when brand names like Peach and Bold first came about they sounded really strange. Of course now that we have gotten used to those names it’s time to change things up again.
The old 10 Play logo did annoy me, with the “play” arrow inside the “0”. It looked quite nice but was such a subtle difference to the primary logo that most people probably never even noticed it… so why bother 🤷🏻♂️
Interesting timing. Were they waiting intentionally for The Project’s cancellation and the debut of 10 News+ to drop the ‘Play’?
And on a slightly unrelated note, I wonder if one day any of the commercial networks will ever rebrand away from their traditional channel number. In this digital age the number will make less and less sense as time goes on (aside from existing brand recognition and continuing with tradition, obviously.) Not that it makes much difference really… but I find this kind of thing fascinating to think about. 🤓😆
It was probably just easier to rollout all these big changes at the same time.
10 will have to be careful with promos, as there’s often programming not available to live stream (it comes up with a placeholder advising as such that you must either watch on terrestrial broadcast and/or on demand only). The other networks don’t appear to have this rights issue.
The circle in their logo still looks like a roll of toilet paper
Made me laugh :’) Sad reality is this might be the next “rebrand” when this doesn’t stick.
10 Comedy showing food shows and other random stuff will be the punchline of this transformation – they should have just brought back 11.
I feel this is interesting if only for the fact that if I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here does return then they won’t be able to go on their long stories of talking about 10play as if it was the greatest website in the world. Won’t really work the same way having to say 10.com.au instead.
I think they can simplify even further and call the channels 10, Eleven, One, …. Oh wait..
Thanks David for the update , will the vast channels be new channels on free to air or only via the streaming platform?
I’ve asked if VAST is affected. FAST channels will not be linear broadcast.