Kyle Sandilands let cameras follow him for 6 months, and the last episode goes up tonight

Kyle Sandilands has made a documentary about the year he lost the highest paid job in Australian radio, and it's what people are paying to watch. At Home With Kyle runs in four parts on Kyle Sandilands Live, and the final episode goes up tonight, Monday 3 August, at 6pm. He launched the whole thing on Karl Stefanovic's podcast on Sunday, and offered Stefanovic a job on it while he was there.

At Home With Kyle is billed as giving unprecedented access to Sandilands during what the platform calls a pivotal moment in his life, taking viewers behind closed doors rather than back over the headlines. Episodes 1, 2 and 3 are already up, running between 19 and 27 minutes each, alongside a trailer.

There's a free preview on the page if you want a look before you decide, and the full series sits behind the subscription. Sandilands told Karl Stefanovic his team has been filming it for the last 6 months, which means the cameras were running while the year was actually happening to him rather than being pointed at him afterwards.

In that same interview, Sandilands set out how the money behind the whole operation actually works.

Stefanovic, 51, was the guest speaker at the Prince Alfred Old Collegians' Association annual dinner at the Adelaide Convention Centre on Friday night, where more than 400 guests paid up to $140 a ticket. He told the room he'd spent that day with Sandilands and businessman Clive Palmer, and that Sandilands had put an offer to him on the spot, according to the Sunday Mail.

"I finished the day with Kyle Sandilands who offered me a job," Stefanovic said, describing the platform as one "that is already making him millions".

It's the firmest word yet on a tie up One News first reported was in the works on 1 July.

Kyle Sandilands Live is already running and already charging. The daily show starts on Monday 10 August, running 6am to 10am, Monday to Friday, live in both audio and video through his own app. Episodes stay up to watch whenever you want, and the same feed runs on a website and on connected TVs.

The schedule is already published, with the first one billed as his first show back on 10 August and daily editions listed through that week. A second series, Building The Show, lands on 5, 7 and 9 August and follows the build up to it. There's no advertising in any of it, and no station sitting between Sandilands and the microphone. A subscription costs $99 for the year, as RadioInfo and B&T have reported.

At $99 a head, every 10,000 people who sign up is $990,000 a year landing before a single advertiser is asked for anything. Sandilands' manager Bruno Bouchet told The Sunday Telegraph that subscriptions were already running into the tens of thousands before the daily show has gone to air at all.

That's the model both men are now betting on, and it turns the old one inside out. In commercial radio and free to air television the money comes from advertisers, and the audience is what's being sold to them.

Kyle Sandilands says investors want Karl Stefanovic doing afternoons

In the interview, Sandilands said financiers had approached him about investing in the platform. He put their scenario to Stefanovic directly: Sandilands in the morning, Stefanovic on afternoons, and Ray Hadley out of retirement to fill the middle of the day. The word network came up almost immediately.

"KS Live. We could bookend this thing," Sandilands said.

He said the sums those investors ran showed his show on its own could turn more profit than an entire radio network. He also said he owns 100% of the business, with ARN left holding a revenue share of 19.1% on profit above the first $3 million he makes each year.

On his own account he's banked enough to run the operation for 3 years without a single daily show going out. At 200,000 subscribers he put the business at $20 million profit a year, and that's the point where he says the giveaways start.

Kyle Sandilands settled fast and cheap, then spent the payout on his old staff

The Australian's Media Diary reports that ARN had quietly set aside up to $35 million to settle Sandilands' claim that it sacked him unlawfully, rather than fight him in open court. He'd sued for $85 million, and his lawyers believed they could land him around $40 million. He settled for $12.09 million, the report says, after dealing directly with then ARN chief Ciaran Davis.

On those numbers the decision cost him about $23 million. It puts his rush to settle down partly to avoiding a brutal court fight, and partly to feeling responsible for the staff whose jobs went when the show was blown up. He's since used the money to hire many of them onto the new venture himself.

The settlement is paid in monthly instalments through to the end of June 2029, and it includes $1.5 million worth of advertising across ARN's own platforms for the subscription service he's built since. The company that ended his show is now helping pay to promote the thing competing with it.

Why an advertiser campaign can't reach a show the audience pays for

Both men lost network jobs in businesses funded by advertising, and in both cases the pressure was applied at the advertiser.

The Mad F***ing Witches Facebook page ran a #KancelKarl campaign calling on sponsors to pull their money out of Stefanovic's Nine programs. Sandilands then quit as a judge on Australian Idol on 31 July, saying the same activists had gone after the show's advertisers and caused a problem for Channel Seven's sales team. He said he was standing down "for the good of the brand to continue", as TV Tonight reported.

Write to enough sponsors and a network will eventually decide a presenter costs more than he earns. That lever only exists while somebody else is paying for the show. Once the audience is the customer, there's no sales team to lobby and no advertiser to frighten, and the only people who can cancel Kyle Sandilands are the ones who've handed over $99.

Karl Stefanovic says covering Bondi is what finished him at Today

Stefanovic left Today after two decades in the chair, following the Tommy Robinson interview on his own podcast, The Karl Stefanovic Show, that was stripped from platforms in June. He told the Adelaide dinner the decision had been forming in him well before that, and that covering the Bondi terror attack last December was what did it.

He said he'd reported terror attacks in Paris, Nice and Brussels, and that the Sydney attack was the one he couldn't put down. "That was the start of the end for me," he said.

On his critics he was less reflective, saying he'd like to see the mad witches "with a spitfire up their arse", which drew cheers from the room. He returned several times to free speech, saying it was embedded in him early and calling it "a hill I am prepared to die on".

He also used the night to write off the Liberal Party, calling it "f**ked", saying people have had enough of both major parties, and suggesting the Liberals would be a chance again if Tony Abbott returned. His view that Donald Trump is the most engaging president of his lifetime got a heckler removed from the venue.

Death threats, police reports, and the episode Kyle Sandilands recorded with Karl Stefanovic

Bouchet has also told The Sunday Telegraph that Sandilands has been the target of death threats, that the matters have gone to police, and that security around him has been stepped up.

The interview went up at 3pm on Sunday 2 August, after Stefanovic teased it as covering death threats, standing their ground and what he calls "assassination culture".

Stefanovic's podcast has already out rated the program that dropped him, and Nine has since cut 30 jobs.

Tens of thousands of people have already paid to watch him at home, and the breakfast show hasn't even started.