Message from the station manager:
Promos:
Hosted break segments:
Sir Nicholas Shehadie, chairman of Special Broadcasting Service.
His prediction to have SBS rolled out to each state capital was close but fell a bit short. He predicted a three-year timeframe (end of 1985), it was 3.5 (June 1986)
Unfortunately any expansion to Darwin still took almost another decade.
Any ideas who were introing the stuff on that night?
When did SBS start broadcasting regionally?
Silvio Rivier
Goulburn, Cooma - 1983 (coinciding with launch in Canberra)
Newcastle, Wollongong - 1985 (coinciding with Adelaide, Brisbane/Gold Coast)
Then progressively around the country during the 1990s. IIRC there was a big regional expansion around 1994ish.
Bendigo and Ballarat (and Gippsland too IIRC) got SBS-TV in early 1992, a month or so after aggregation.
Interestingly, many Shepparton viewers installed seperate UHF antennas to receive SBS Bendigo because there was no local SBS-TV from Mt Major. I think they got SBS around 1997, along with most other regions.
I would be interested to find out the commencement dates of SBS in the regional areas during the 1990s and 2000s. Can’t seem to find anything online.
The Department of Transport & Communications’ annual reports (for the late 80s/early 90s) are good places to start, likewise the old SBS annual reports. You can find them in NLA’s Trove.
Department of Transport & Communications annual reports:
SBS annual reports:
According to the 1991-92 Department of Transport & Communications’ annual report, SBS commenced broadcasting in the Gippsland region in November 1991, whilst it commenced in Bendigo & Ballarat in April 1992.
Yes i remember Gippsland had it around aggregation time as we could pick up the Gippsland UHF channels.
Not sure why Shepparton had such a long wait. It’s UHF frequency was included in Hills Antennas local aggregation brochure from 1991. But it just took years to come on air.
According to the Wikipedia article, Shepparton got SBS in November 2001 and was the last city to do so.
One very cool logo IMO. A masterpiece.
Really emphasized the ‘0’ in Channel 0.
Did they just ignore the 28 after 1983?
Is it’s virtual channel 3 now?
The VHF-0 frequency was only meant to be temporary. On 5 January 1986, SBS TV ceased broadcasting on channel 0, making it Australia’s first sole UHF network.
That was until the mid 1990s when SBS stations started to pop up in the VHF band in some remote areas.
Was that in regional Australia?
The full logo (1980-83) included “Channel 0 and Channel 28”. But realistically, probably 99.99% of its viewers were watching Channel 0 - if they could pick it up.
By about 1983, around the time it became Network 0-28 and expanded into Canberra, etc., there was a push to get Melbourne and Sydney viewers to convert to watching Channel 28, as the original close-off date for Channel 0 was fast approaching (December 1984 IIRC) and SBS was looking at losing most of the few viewers it had. Although SBS did manage to get a one-year extension and Channel 0 didn’t switch off until January 1986.
But the “O” component of logo continued to feature until 1993.