Nine-owned streaming service Stan won’t be following Netflix and Disney+ into the world of ad-supported content, and the reason is simple.

“We don’t need to put ads into Stan,” chief sales officer Michael Stephenson told Mumbrella. “We already have an ad-funded streaming product, it’s called 9Now.”

Stephenson points out that advertisers have a slight presence on Stan Sport already.

“If you’re buying into our rugby coverage, of course, all of the integration from Nine does get pulled through into the Stan Sport platform.

“So unlike others, we don’t need to put ads in there. We’ve spoken publicly before, both myself and Mike [Sneesby] around the economics of doing that.

“We don’t see any benefits, certainly for our company. So there are no plans to do that anytime in the future.”

Stephenson feels Netflix and Disney+ are likely to take advertising dollars directly from the likes of YouTube rather than from the commercial TV operators.

“I think if you’re an advertiser and you were spending money on digital video today, I suspect the smart ones would take their money away from social video like YouTube and Facebook and move that into Netflix and BVOD, as opposed to moving any of their advertising dollars today from 9Now, 7Plus or 10Play into Netflix.”

Listen to the entire podcast on Mumbrella.