The ABC / Bluey Deal Was Fine, Actually

Aunty ain't Netflix

“If only it were reliable and consistent. "K-Pop [Demon Hunters]" was probably our 30th animated film. So it's not at all reliable and consistent. Now it is a lot more like that of art, and seeing the contrarian edge, and what's the story. I mean, imagine the pitch for K-Pop Demon Hunters, right? You know, so it doesn't fit a set of formulas. So in that way, it is a lot like venture. And also that a few of the companies will generate outsized returns.”

— Reed Hastings, Founder CEO of Netflix

“Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess — and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

— William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade

“If I had said yes to all the projects I turned down, and no to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same.”

— Hollywood Studio Executive in William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade

Netflix distributed KPop Demon Hunters in 2025. It sat there gathering moss, and then exploded into the most-viewed animated film in the platform’s history. Netflix’s CEO admitted they didn’t know it was a hit on the opening weekend. Their billion-dollar recommendation engine — the same one trained on the viewing habits of every Netflix subscriber on Earth — missed it.

In a Brisbane back room in 2017, the ABC’s Michael Carrington saw a five-minute pitch at the Asian Animation Summit. He liked it. He gave Ludo Studio $20,000 to refine the pilot. The ABC then commissioned 52 seven-minute episodes in partnership with BBC Worldwide. The BBC funded roughly 30% of the budget in exchange for global broadcast and commercial rights.

This is, and was, an entirely standard international co-production split for mid-2010s preschool animation. It is the same deal structure used since the late 1980s. The international partner takes the rest-of-world risk because it has the rest-of-world infrastructure. The domestic broadcaster gets cheap, on-charter content for its audience. Both parties make a bet. Most of the time, neither of them gets rich.

But this was not most of the time. This was Bluey. In 2025 Bluey was the most-streamed show in America — not the most-streamed kids' show, the most-streamed show, full stop, ahead of every adult drama and prestige flagship in the country — racking up 45 billion viewing minutes on Disney+ in a single year. It has been sold into 140+ countries and translated into more than 20 languages. 400 million views in a country of 26 million people, which means the average Australian has, statistically, watched 15 episodes of a children's cartoon about a blue heeler. It is the first Australian series ever licensed to Disney+. There is a Disney/BBC/Ludo theatrical movie booked into cinemas for August 2027. BBC Studios pulled £2.2 billion in commercial revenue in 2024-25 and Bluey is "a significant part" of US$3.6 billion in global retail sales. Brand Finance values the franchise at US$2 billion. A property whose entire creative seed was a $20,000 pilot animatic, made by a small Brisbane studio, refined over a five-minute pitch in a Queensland conference room, has inside seven years become one of the most lucrative pieces of children's IP on the planet. An Australian cultural export that has come to completely dominate its category.

And so we have spent 2026 listening to my friend Charlie Gearside call it “the shittest deal ever,” to Hugh Marks — the ABC’s own Managing Director — lament it as “$300 million of income that’s going to the UK,” to Ben Fordham declare it “the world’s worst deal,” and to Senator Dave Sharma demand the ABC “be alive to opportunities to commercialise its content.”

Lol. Yeah, and you should have bought shares in Amazon and Google in 2005. Bitcoin in 2015. NVIDIA in 2020. You idiot.

Nobody knows anything

Peppa Pig was a £1.3m gamble that Channel 5 funded about 12% of. The commercial broadcaster, whose entire reason for existing is to capture this kind of upside, chose to be a minority funder of what became a £100m business by 2009 and part of a US$3.8bn Hasbro deal a decade later. Pokémon was a Game Boy cartridge from a near-bankrupt studio. Teletubbies came out of the BBC and an indie producer with a working chemistry for unhinged preschool concepts. None of these properties were obvious at the time.

In 2017, the ABC paid $20,000 for a seven-minute pilot from a Brisbane indie with a portfolio of shows almost no Australian had heard of. To insist that anyone in the room should have spotted the future bonanza from there is to insist that the ABC’s children’s commissioning team in 2017 had a hit-picking ability that Netflix’s algorithm today still does not.

What is the ABC for?

The ABC is for government-sanctioned gardening propaganda, not moonshots.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983 lists the ABC’s functions. It uses words like “innovative,” “national identity,” “inform and entertain,” “cultural diversity,” and “educational.” It is not a venture studio. It is spiritually a cardigan wearer.

Compare this with the BBC. BBC Worldwide existed as a dedicated commercial subsidiary in some form from 1979. BBC Studios — the merged in-house production and commercial entity — was formed in April 2018, the year after the Bluey deal was signed. BBC Studios employs entire international consumer-products teams. Its children’s content director flies around the world looking for licensing-grade IP. That is her entire job. BBC Studios returns roughly £200–£276 million a year to the BBC. It exists, explicitly, “to maximise profits on behalf of the BBC.”

ABC Commercial — the ABC’s equivalent commercial arm — turned a profit of A$4.4 million in FY18-19.

Asking that operation to negotiate the retention of global merchandising rights on an unproven Brisbane animation — on the foresight that it would become a $2 billion franchise — and then to exploit those rights at scale, is not a critique of the 2017 deal. It is a critique of forty years of structural decisions about what kind of public broadcaster Australia wants.

High on bias

“The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do.”

— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Hindsight bias was named by Baruch Fischhoff in 1975. His original paper was titled, I knew it would happen. The phenomenon comes in three stacked layers: memory distortion, inflated estimates of objective likelihood, and inflated subjective confidence in one’s own predictive ability. The bigger the missed upside, the larger the bias. There is no missed upside in Australian memory more conspicuous than Bluey. The conditions for maximum hindsight bias are exactly satisfied.

Add survivorship bias. The ABC commissions twenty to thirty new domestic kids’ titles a year. The vast majority of them never break out of Australia. Many of them are signed on identical international co-pro terms. You don’t know their names because they failed. Bluey is the survivor. To single it out as the deal that should have been negotiated differently is to pretend, retroactively, that it was distinguishable in 2017 from the dozens of other deals that weren’t.

Stop beating up Aunty

They call ABC Aunty, for goodness sakes. She’s an old bag. Cut her some slack. She’s not the problem. She is one shriveled tentacle in the sclerotic gerontocracy smothering Australian life. These are decrepit legacy institutions. SBS — the ABC’s sister government channel — was started to give foreign-born Australians foreign-language content. And it’s expanded! They have their own streaming app! They still haven’t heard of the internet in these places. They don’t know YouTube exists. They demand your tax dollars to fund their little shows for foreigners in the age of the internet. That’s who you’re dealing with. Imagine demanding they compete with Reed Hastings of Netflix, approaching half a trillion dollar market cap, who himself admits they have no idea.

An Australian studio that churns out hits and captures their value does not look like the ABC. It is not staffed or run or funded like the ABC. Asking the ABC to have predicted the merch curve is asking grandma to win an F1 race. Hollywood and Netflix can barely do their schtick. No government in the world has replicated that capability.

There are many, many reasons to beat up on our ruling class. Their negligence every day borders on treason. I understand the deep frustration with Australia’s Ls — they keep piling up. Two decades of own goals. But beating up Aunty for not being Netflix is just silly.