At the stroke of midnight on Tuesday, 10 All Access will disappear. Any mourning will be brief, though, as instantly taking its place will be Paramount+, Ten’s second stab at a subscription video on demand service since the debt-laden Australian television network was bought by the American media giant CBS for a bargain-basement $123 million in November 2017.

Ten’s first streaming play was a locally badged version of America’s CBS All Access, and invited subscribers to pay $8.99 a month, largely for ad-free versions of series they could also watch for free on 10Play, as long as they were willing to sit through ads.

Paramount+ promises to be a much more considered foray into the booming subscription video on demand market, bringing together the offerings of the American CBS network, its premium cable brand Showtime, and the film and TV output (and, crucially, back catalogue) of Paramount studios, along with local commissions such as Five Bedrooms (originally a Ten commission, but with a new season set to debut on the service), and live sport, thanks to the recent deal to cover Australian soccer in its various iterations (A-League, W-League, Matildas and Socceroos games).

“The platform will accommodate a much broader slate of content, and there’s movies and there’s a lot more verticals,” says Beverley McGarvey, chief content officer and executive vice-president of ViacomCBS Australia (with American ownership comes the American job title).

But the new platform isn’t a complete bulldozer job, more a stylish renovation of what was there already. “It is a technical kind of restack, it isn’t just All Access with a facelift,” says McGarvey. “It is a different piece of tech - to a degree.”

The SVOD market – in which consumers pay for access to content delivered over the internet, rather than via transmission towers – is increasingly important for broadcasters as they seek to transition from a schedule-based, ad-supported model.

The most recent data from Roy Morgan reported 16 per cent growth in SVOD take-up in Australia last year, spurred in large part by rolling lockdowns. The January survey estimated more than 17 million Australians now have access to at least one SVOD service, with Netflix way out in front of a pack that includes Stan (owned by Nine, publisher of this masthead), Amazon Prime Video and Disney+.

Traditional broadcasters have seen good growth in broadcast video on demand – the ad-supported broadcast video on demand (Seven will have added millions of new sign-ups to its 7Plus platform in the past month on account of the Olympics) – but future-proofing demands they claim a slice of the SVOD pie too.